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Our goal is to gain a deeper insight into the principles of such migrations and to develop theoretical models which account qualitatively and quantitatively for the observed migration patterns. To do so it is of great importance to understand what drives cells to break the isotropy of their uncoordinated random walk and to change over into collective directed migration. Micropatterning techniques can be exploited to decrease the number of cells in contact and to provide defined boundary conditions, reducing notably the degrees of freedom of the system and constraining the number of possible cell movements. Here, the migratory behavior of epithelial cells seeded on circle shaped microstructures, artificially created via micro contact printing (µCP) or microscale plasma initiated patterning (µPIP) are studied. In such an environment, the onset of a cohort circular migration after few hours of confinement clearly represents a symmetry breaking event. We observe that cell assemblies rotate with a common constant angular velocity dependent on the number of confined cells. The angular velocity decreases with increasing number of cells per assembly. Also changes in direction of rotation are observed, which seem yet in most cases to be triggered by disturbances such as cell divisions, but can also appear spontaneously. To emulate such behavior theoretically, the standard cellular Potts model was modified by F. Thüroff from the group of Erwin Frey, to account for both energy minimization and processes like cell polarization and persistent migration. Finally, we compare our experimental findings with the theoretical simulations. |
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| © 2011 Physics of Cancer | Soft Matter Physics Division, University of Leipzig. Imprint & Disclaimer | ||||||||||||||||
