Viscoelasticity and cell jamming state transition

Abstract

Although collective cell migration (CCM) is a highly coordinated migratory mode, perturbations in the form of jamming state transitions and vice versa often occur even in 2D. These perturbations are involved in various biological processes, such as embryogenesis, wound healing, and cancer invasion. CCM induces accumulation of cell residual stress, which has a feedback impact to cell packing density. Density-mediated change of cell mobility influences the state of viscoelasticity of multicellular systems and on that base the jamming state transition. Although a good comprehension of how cells collectively migrate by following molecular rules has been generated, the impact of cellular rearrangements on cell viscoelasticity remains less understood, thus considering that the density-driven evolution of viscoelasticity caused by reduction of cell mobility could result in a powerful tool in order to address the contribution of cell jamming state transition in CCM and help to understand this important but still a controversial topic. In this work a review of existing literature in CCM modeling is given along with an assortment of published experimental findings, in order to invite experimentalists to test the given theoretical considerations in multicellular systems. In addition, five viscoelastic states gained within three regimes: (1) convective regime, (2) conductive regime, and (3) damped-conductive regime, which were discussed with special emphasis of jamming and unjamming states.