2023/12/18 by Jan Rozman, K. V. S. Chaithanya, Rozman, Jan +5 · 3 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #Cellular Mechanics and Interactions #FOS: Physical sciences #Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer #Micro and Nano Robotics #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.11756
openalex publication_date 2023/12/18 · openalex created_date 2023/12/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Complex tissue flows in epithelia are driven by intra- and inter-cellular processes that generate, maintain, and coordinate mechanical forces. There has been growing evidence that cell shape anisotropy, manifested as nematic order, plays an important role in this process. Here we extend an active nematic vertex model by replacing substrate friction with internal viscous dissipation, dominant in epithelia not supported by a substrate or the extracellular matrix, which are found in many early-stage embryos. When coupled to cell shape anisotropy, the internal viscous dissipation allows for long-range velocity correlations and thus enables the spontaneous emergence of flows with a large degree of spatiotemporal organisation. We demonstrate sustained flow in epithelial sheets confined to a channel, providing a link between the cell-level vertex model of tissue dynamics and continuum active nematics, whose behaviour in a channel is theoretically understood and experimentally realisable. Our findings also show a simple mechanism that could account for collective cell migration correlated over distances large compared to the cell size, as observed during morphogenesis.