2018/02/21 by Chepizhko, Oleksandr, Lionetti, Maria Chiara, Malinverno, Chiara +3 · 1 citation
#Biological Physics (physics.bio-ph) #Cell Behavior (q-bio.CB) #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1802.07488
Cell monolayers provide an interesting example of active matter, exhibiting a phase transition from a flowing to jammed state as they age. Here we report experiments and numerical simulations illustrating how a jammed cellular layer rapidly reverts to a flowing state after a wound. Quantitative comparison between experiments and simulations shows that cells change their self-propulsion and alignement strength so that the system crosses a phase transition line, which we characterize by finite-size scaling in an active particle model. This wound-induced unjamming transition is found to occur generically in epithelial, endothelial and cancer cells.