Aggregation dynamics of active cells on non-adhesive substrate

Abstract

Cellular self-assembly and organization are fundamental steps for the development of biological tissues. In this paper, within the framework of a cellular automata model, we address how an ordered tissue pattern spontaneously emerges from a randomly migrating single cell population without the influence of any external cues. This model is based on the active motility of cells and their ability to reorganize due to cell-cell cohesivity as observed in experiments. Our model successfully emulates the formation of nascent clusters and also predicts the temporal evolution of aggregates that leads to the compact tissue structures. Moreover, the simulations also capture several dynamical properties of growing aggregates, such as, the rate of cell aggregation and non-monotonic growth of the aggregate area which show a good agreement with the existing experimental observations. We further investigate the time evolution of the cohesive strength, and the compactness of aggregates, and also study the ruggedness of the growing structures by evaluating the fractal dimension to get insights into the complexity of tumorous tissue growth which were hitherto unexplored.

Fatty acid-based polymeric micelles to ameliorate amyloidogenic disorders

“…Motivated by the experimental observations, we further investigated how the insulin fibrillation process is influenced by the presence of FA moieties in the FABC micelles based on a theoretical framework of diffusion-limited aggregation. [50][51][52][53] We first studied the aggregation process in the absence of FABC micelles. In our model, we consider "N" the number of insulin monomers randomly deposited on a (L × L) lattice system.…”

Growth kinetics and power laws indicate distinct mechanisms of cell-cell interactions in the aggregation process

“…Experiments performed by Steinberg and collaborators demonstrated that cell aggregation and selective spreading of cells in a mixed cell population could occur simply due to the differences in the interfacial adhesion strength even in the absence of any differential chemical cues [42] which could be explained by Differential adhesion hypothesis (DAH). DAH provides an insight into such aggregation of cohesive cells and inspired many discrete cell models to understand various morphological structures during the development [20-–23, 43, 44]. We construct our model based on DAH, where motile and cohesive cells spontaneously adhere with each other to maximize the cohesive binding strength and minimize the cell-ECM interfacial energy of the system.…”

Flocking: Influence of Metric Versus Topological Interactions

“…Cohesive group formation is one of the most eyecatching displays in nature. It is observed among various species, such as, flock of birds [1, 2], school of fishes [3], swarm of prey [4,5], colony of bacteria [6], aggregation of cells [7], and pedestrian crowd [8]. The instances of collective behaviours have also been demonstrated in non-living systems including multi-agent robots [9], vibrated disks [10], artificial microswimmers [11] etc.…”