No Arabic abstract
Cell migration, which can be significantly affected by intracellular signaling pathways (ICSP) and extracellular matrix (ECM), plays a crucial role in many physiological and pathological processes. The efficiency of cell migration, which is typically modeled as a persistent random walk (PRW), depends on two critical motility parameters, i.e., migration speed and persistence. It is generally very challenging to efficiently and accurately extract these key dynamics parameters from noisy experimental data. Here, we employ the normalized Shannon entropy to quantify the deviation of cell migration dynamics from that of diffusive/ballistic motion as well as to derive the persistence of cell migration based on the Fourier power spectrum of migration velocities. Moreover, we introduce the time-varying Shannon entropy based on the wavelet power spectrum of cellular dynamics and demonstrate its superior utility to characterize the time-dependent persistence of cell migration, which is typically resulted from complex and time-varying intra or extra-cellular mechanisms. We employ our approach to analyze trajectory data of in vitro cell migration regulated by distinct intracellular and extracellular mechanisms, exhibiting a rich spectrum of dynamic characteristics. Our analysis indicates that the combination of Shannon entropy and wavelet transform offers a simple and efficient tool to estimate the persistence of cell migration, which may also reflect the real-time effects of ICSP-ECM to some extent.
Collections of cells exhibit coherent migration during morphogenesis, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In many cases, bigger clusters split, smaller sub-clusters collide and reassemble, and gaps continually emerge. The connections between cell-level adhesion and cluster-level dynamics, as well as the resulting consequences for cluster properties such as migration velocity, remain poorly understood. Here we investigate collective migration of one- and two-dimensional cell clusters that collectively track chemical gradients using a mechanism based on contact inhibition of locomotion. We develop both a minimal description based on the lattice gas model of statistical physics, and a more realistic framework based on the cellular Potts model which captures cell shape changes and cluster rearrangement. In both cases, we find that cells have an optimal adhesion strength that maximizes cluster migration speed. The optimum negotiates a tradeoff between maintaining cell-cell contact and maintaining cluster fluidity, and we identify maximal variability in the cluster aspect ratio as a revealing signature. Our results suggest a collective benefit for intermediate cell-cell adhesion.
Amoeboid cell migration is characterized by frequent changes of the direction of motion and resembles a persistent random walk on long time scales. Although it is well known that cell migration is typically driven by the actin cytoskeleton, the cause of this migratory behavior remains poorly understood. We analyze the spontaneous dynamics of actin assembly due to nucleation promoting factors, where actin filaments lead to an inactivation of the nucleators. We show that this system exhibits excitable dynamics and can spontaneously generate waves, which we analyse in detail. By using a phase-field approach, we show that these waves can generate cellular random walks. We explore how the characteristics of these persistent random walks depend on the parameters governing the actin-nucleator dynamics. In particular, we find that the effective diffusion constant and the persistence time depend strongly on the speed of filament assembly and the rate of nucleator inactivation. Our findings point to a deterministic origin of the random walk behavior and suggest that cells could adapt their migration pattern by modifying the pool of available actin.
Cell crawling is critical to biological development, homeostasis and disease. In many cases, cell trajectories are quasi-random-walk. In vitro assays on flat surfaces often described such quasi-random-walk cell trajectories as approximations to a solution of a Langevin process. However, experiments show quasi-diffusive behavior at small timescales, indicating that instantaneous velocity and velocity autocorrelations are not well-defined. We propose to characterize mean-squared cell displacement using a modified Furth equation with three temporal and spatial regimes: short- and long-time/range diffusion and intermediate time/range ballistic motion. This analysis collapses mean-squared displacements of previously published experimental data onto a single-parameter family of curves, allowing direct comparison between movement in different cell types, and between experiments and numerical simulations. Our method also show that robust cell-motility quantification requires an experiment with a maximum interval between images of a few percent of the cell-motion persistence time or less, and a duration of a few orders-of-magnitude longer than the cell-motion persistence time or more.
Key to collective cell migration is the ability of cells to rearrange their position with respect to their neighbors. Recent theory and experiments demonstrated that cellular rearrangements are facilitated by cell shape, with cells having more elongated shapes and greater perimeters more easily sliding past their neighbors within the cell layer. Though it is thought that cell perimeter is controlled primarily by cortical tension and adhesion at each cells periphery, experimental testing of this hypothesis has produced conflicting results. Here we studied collective cell migration in an epithelial monolayer by measuring forces, cell perimeters, and motion, and found all three to decrease with either increased cell density or inhibition of cell contraction. In contrast to previous understanding, the data suggest that cell shape and rearrangements are controlled not by cortical tension or adhesion at the cell periphery but rather by the stress fibers that produce tractions at the cell-substrate interface. This finding is confirmed by an experiment showing that increasing tractions reverses the effect of density on cell shape and rearrangements. Our study therefore reduces the focus on the cell periphery by establishing cell-substrate traction as a major physical factor controlling cell shape and motion in collective cell migration.
In order to use persistence diagrams as a true statistical tool, it would be very useful to have a good notion of mean and variance for a set of diagrams. In 2011, Mileyko and his collaborators made the first study of the properties of the Frechet mean in $(mathcal{D}_p,W_p)$, the space of persistence diagrams equipped with the p-th Wasserstein metric. In particular, they showed that the Frechet mean of a finite set of diagrams always exists, but is not necessarily unique. The means of a continuously-varying set of diagrams do not themselves (necessarily) vary continuously, which presents obvious problems when trying to extend the Frechet mean definition to the realm of vineyards. We fix this problem by altering the original definition of Frechet mean so that it now becomes a probability measure on the set of persistence diagrams; in a nutshell, the mean of a set of diagrams will be a weighted sum of atomic measures, where each atom is itself a persistence diagram determined using a perturbation of the input diagrams. This definition gives for each $N$ a map $(mathcal{D}_p)^N to mathbb{P}(mathcal{D}_p)$. We show that this map is Holder continuous on finite diagrams and thus can be used to build a useful statistic on time-varying persistence diagrams, better known as vineyards.