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Directed fibroblast migration is central to highly proliferative processes in regenerative medicine and developmental biology, such as wound healing and embryogenesis. However, the mechanisms by which single fibroblasts affect each others directional decisions, while chemotaxing in microscopic tissue pores, are not well understood. Therefore, we explored the effects of two types of relevant social interactions on fibroblast PDGF-BB-induced migration in microfluidic tissue-mimicking mazes: cell sequence and mitosis. Surprisingly, it was found that in both cases, the cells display behavior that is contradictory to the chemoattractant gradient established in the maze. In case of the sequence, the cells do not like to take the same path through the maze as their predecessor, when faced with a bifurcation. To the contrary, they tend to alternate - if a leading cell takes the shorter (steeper gradient) path, the cell following it chooses the longer (weaker gradient) path, and vice versa. Additionally, we found that when a mother cell divides, its two daughters go in opposite directions (even if it means migrating against the chemoattractant gradient and overcoming on-going cell traffic). Therefore, it is apparent that fibroblasts modify each others directional decisions in a manner that is counter-intuitive to what is expected from classical chemotaxis theory. Consequently, accounting for these effects could lead to a better understanding of tissue generation in vivo, and result in more advanced engineered tissue products in vitro.
Measurements on embryonic epithelial tissues in a diverse range of organisms have shown that the statistics of cell neighbor numbers are universal in tissues where cell proliferation is the primary cell activity. Highly simplified non-spatial models
Stem cells can precisely and robustly undergo cellular differentiation and lineage commitment, referred to as stemness. However, how the gene network underlying stemness regulation reliably specifies cell fates is not well understood. To address this
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The phenomenological model for cell shape deformation and cell migration (Chen et.al. 2018; Vermolen and Gefen 2012) is extended with the incorporation of cell traction forces and the evolution of cell equilibrium shapes as a result of cell different
Statistical physics provides a useful perspective for the analysis of many complex systems; it allows us to relate microscopic fluctuations to macroscopic observations. Developmental biology, but also cell biology more generally, are examples where a