Berlin 2018 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 36: Cell Adhesion and Migration, Multicellular Systems II

BP 36.7: Talk

Friday, March 16, 2018, 11:15–11:30, H 1028

Dynamics of Cell Jamming: Disentangling the Shape and Density Dependences — •Jürgen Lippoldt, Steffen Grosser, Paul Heine, Linda Oswald, and Josef Käs — Peter Debye Institute for Soft Matter Physics, University Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

Cellular dynamics have been shown to display characteristics of jamming transitions, which originally had been observed as a function of cell number density (Angelini et al., PNAS 2011). Recently, the Self-Propelled Voronoi (SPV) model has predicted a density-independent transition as a result of the counter play of adhesion and contractile forces (Bi et al., Nat. Phys. 2015), visible in the dimensionless shape parameter.

We use cell tracking combined with Voronoi tessellation of the nuclei to estimate the probability of T1 transitions and neighborhood exchanges. Thereby, we can describe the local fluidity of a cell layer and look for the onset of cellular jamming. A moderately high density is required for epithelial-like MCF-10A cells to jam. Within this high-density regime, the correlation of fluidity and shape of the individual local cells is stronger than the correlation of fluidity and local density. Mesenchymal-like MDA-MB-231 cells stay fluid even for very high densities and never reach the round configurations that correlate to jamming for epithelial-like MCF-10A. In co-culture, both cell types demix and MDA-MB-231 cells form unjammed islands within the jammed collective of MCF-10A cells.