Interactions between migrating cells can lead to emergent, collective structures and dynamical phases that are critical for function and mediate many physiological processes such as embryonic development, wound healing, and cancer metastasis. In this talk, I shall first describe our work on modeling such phenomena in cancer cell clusters, highlighting how frustration can arise at the group level because of heterogeneity in behavior and cohesion among individual cells in the cluster. I shall show how this frustration can be resolved leading to new collective phases of motion as well as instabilities that are experimentally observed in malignant lymphocyte clusters and functionally important – enabling robust chemotaxis and “load sharing” among cells. I will also briefly discuss work showing how long-range substrate-mediated mechanical interactions between cells can lead to the formation of branched network structures. I shall discuss our prediction that cell network formation is substrate stiffness-dependent, being optimal at intermediate stiffness, which we confirmed with experiments. Our work suggests that long-range interactions can lead to more robust and efficient realization of space-spanning networks than with cell-cell contact interactions alone. Finally I will discuss some open questions and potential future directions in these areas.
A Thu, study studied this question.