Berlin 2024 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 23: Focus Session: Inference Methods and Biological Data (German-French Focus Session) (joint session BP/DY)
BP 23.4: Talk
Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 16:00–16:15, H 2032
From two to three cells: Are three-body interactions important in collective cell migration? — •Agathe Jouneau1, Tom Brandstätter2, Emily Brieger1, Chase Broedersz2, and Joachim Rädler1 — 1Faculty of Physics and Center for NanoScience, LMU Munich, Germany — 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, VU Amsterdam, Netherlands
During collective cell migration, for example in embryo development or cancer invasion, cells coordinate their movement by actively interacting with each other. How cell-cell interactions shape the dynamics and emergent properties of the cell assembly is not fully understood. In recent work, we showed that the dynamics of two cells interacting on a dumbbell pattern can be captured by a particle model, including cell-cell interaction terms directly inferred from experimental data. However, we do not know if the collective dynamics of more than two cells can be described by pairwise interactions between cells, or if higher-order interactions come into play. To answer this question, we use time-lapse microscopy to record the dynamics of three cells interacting together in a tailored confinement. We collect a large number of cell trajectories and use them to infer the cell-cell interactions by adapting the framework of the two-cell study. Our work reveals that the pairwise interactions between cells appear to be preserved in the presence of a third cell. However, the superposition of the inferred pairwise interactions is not sufficient to fully capture the observed three-cell dynamics. This could indicate the presence of three-body interactions, with possible implications for large-scale collective behavior.
Keywords: Cell migration; Cell-cell interactions; Three-body interactions; Stochastic inference