2021/02/22 by Elizabeth Lawson-Keister, Lawson-Keister, Elizabeth, M. Lisa Manning +1 · 1 voice · 4 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · #3D Printing in Biomedical Research #Biocrusts and Microbial Ecology #Cellular Mechanics and Interactions
paper · doi:10.1016/j.ceb.2021.07.011
openalex publication_date 2021/08/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Collective cell motility is crucial to many biological processes including morphogenesis, wound healing, and cancer invasion. Recently, the biology and biophysics communities have begun to use the term cell jamming to describe the collective arrest of cell motion in tissues. Although this term is widely used, the underlying mechanisms are varied. In this review, we highlight three independent mechanisms that can potentially drive arrest of cell motion -- crowding, tension-driven rigidity, and reduction of fluctuations -- and propose a speculative phase diagram that includes all three. Since multiple mechanisms may be operating simultaneously, this emphasizes that experiments should strive to identify which mechanism dominates in a given situation. We also discuss how specific cell-scale and molecular-scale biological processes, such as cell-cell and cell-substrate interactions, control aspects of these underlying physical mechanisms.