Dresden 2020 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 18: Poster VI

BP 18.5: Poster

Tuesday, March 17, 2020, 14:00–16:00, P2/2OG

Stochastic Cell-Cell Interactions in Confined Systems — •Nicolas Arlt¹, David Brückner¹, Alexandra Fink², Joachim Rädler², and Chase Broedersz¹ — ¹Arnold-Sommerfeld-Center for Theoretical Physics and Center for NanoScience, LMU Munich — ²Faculty of Physics and Center for NanoScience, LMU Munich

Assemblies of motile cells can exhibit distinct behaviors, such as clustering to heal a wound or dispersal in cancer cell invasion. Such collective behaviors have been shown to be intimately related to the local contact interactions between individual cells. Here, we investigate how cell-cell interactions affect the dynamics of confined migrating cells. To this end, we place pairs of highly invasive MDA-MB-231 cancer cells on adhesive micropatterns, consisting of two square patches connected by a thin constriction. In this setup, we observe that the cells repeatedly transition across the constriction, leading to repeated 'cellular collisions' in a standardized microenvironment. By obtaining a large dataset of such collision trajectories, we infer an equation of motion for these interacting cell pairs. This model reproduces the key statistics of the interaction dynamics, such as position- and velocity correlations. Our approach allows us to characterize the cell-cell interactions, which we compare for different celltypes and different types of confinement.