Abstract
Biophysical mechanisms underlying collective cell migration of eukaryotic cells have been studied extensively in recent years. One mechanism that induces cells to correlate their motions is contact inhibition of locomotion, by which cells migrating away from the contact site. Here, we report that tail-following behavior at the contact site, termed contact following locomotion (CFL), can induce a non-trivial collective behavior in migrating cells. We show the emergence of a traveling band showing polar order in a mutant Dictyostelium cell that lacks chemotactic activity. We find that CFL is the cell-cell interaction underlying this phenomenon, enabling a theoretical description of how this traveling band forms. We further show that the polar order phase consists of subpopulations that exhibit characteristic transversal motions with respect to the direction of band propagation. These findings describe a novel mechanism of collective cell migration involving cell-cell interactions capable of inducing traveling band with polar order.
Highlights
The collective migration of eukaryotic cells plays crucial roles in processes such as wound healing, tumor progression, and morphogenesis, and has been the focus of extensive study(Haeger et al, 2015)
We further show that this polar order formation is attributable to the tail-following behavior among the migrating cells, which we call contact following locomotion (CFL)
We report that a mutant of Dictyostelium cell that lacks all chemotactic activity exhibits spontaneous segregation into polar ordered solitary band
Summary
The collective migration of eukaryotic cells plays crucial roles in processes such as wound healing, tumor progression, and morphogenesis, and has been the focus of extensive study(Haeger et al, 2015). The study of self-propelled particles has revealed that motile elements which lack such activities may give rise to dynamic collective motion, such as a traveling band(Chaté et al, 2008; Ginelli et al, 2010; Ohta and Yamanaka, 2014; Solon et al., 2015), mediated by a relatively simple transient short-range interaction, such as alignment interaction(Marchetti et al, 2013; Vicsek et al, 1995; Vicsek and Zafeiris, 2012) The emergence of such collective motions of self-propelled particles has been observed in a wide variety of systems, ranging from animal flocks(Ballerini et al, 2008), bacteria swarms(Wioland et al, 2013; Zhang et al, 2010), and cell assemblies(Szabó et al, 2006) to biopolymers and molecular motors(Butt et al, 2010; Sumino et al, 2012; Weber and Semmrich, 2010). In the case of eukaryotic cells, there has been no report to link traveling band formation to short-range cell–cell interactions
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