Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 32: Focus: Stress Relaxation in Polymers - From single molecules to biological cells (joint focus with BP)

CPP 32.9: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 29, 2012, 12:00–12:30, C 243

Cytoskeletal stress in collective cell migration — •Xavier Trepat — Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

For a group a living cells to migrate cohesively, it has long been suspected that each constituent cell must exert physical forces not only upon its extracellular matrix but also upon neighboring cells. I will present the first comprehensive maps of these distinct force components. These maps reveal an unexpectedly rich physical picture in which the distribution of physical forces is dominated by heterogeneity, both in space and in time, which emerges spontaneously propagates over great distances, and cooperates over the span of many cell bodies. Both in epithelial and endothelial cell sheets, these heterogeneous forces are mechanically linked to cell velocities through a newly discovered emergent mechanism of innately collective cell guidance: plithotaxis.