Likelihood-Based Heterogeneity Inference Reveals Non-Stationary Effects in Biohybrid Cell-Cargo Transport

2025/08/18 by Albrecht, Jan, Dautzenberg, Lara S., Opper, Manfred +2
#Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.12976

Abstract

Variability of motility behavior in populations of microbiological agents is an ubiquitous phenomenon even in the case of genetically identical cells. Accordingly, passive objects introduced into such biological systems and driven by them will also exhibit heterogeneous motion patterns. Here, we study a biohybrid system of passive beads driven by active ameboid cells and use a likelihood approach to estimate the heterogeneity of the bead dynamics from their discretely sampled trajectories. We showcase how this approach can deal with information-scarce situations and provides natural uncertainty bounds for heterogeneity estimates. Using these advantages we particularly uncover that the heterogeneity in the system is time-dependent.

Citations

• Emergence of collective oscillations in massive human crowds
• Inferring Parameter Distributions in Heterogeneous Motile Particle Ensembles: A Likelihood Approach for Second Order Langevin Models
• Intrinsic Cell-to-Cell Variance from Experimental Single-Cell Motility Data
• Bayesian inference of wall torques for active Brownian particles
• A review of active matter reviews
• How boundary interactions dominate emergent driving of passive probes in active matter
• Environmental memory facilitates search with home returns
• A minimal physical model for curvotaxis driven by curved protein complexes at the cell's leading edge
• Tumour heterogeneity and cancer cell plasticity

Related

• Inferring Parameter Distributions in Heterogeneous Motile Particle Ensembles: A Likelihood Approach for Second Order Langevin Models
• Intrinsic Cell-to-Cell Variance from Experimental Single-Cell Motility Data
• Learning dynamical models of single and collective cell migration: a review
• Signatures of heterogeneity in the statistical structure of target state aligned ensembles
• Phenotype-structuring of non-local kinetic models of cell migration driven by environmental sensing