Edge instability in incompressible planar active fluids

Abstract

Interfacial instability is highly relevant to many important biological processes. A key example arises in wound healing experiments, which observe that an epithelial layer with an initially straight edge does not heal uniformly. We consider the phenomenon in the context of active fluids. Improving upon the approximation used in J. Zimmermann, M. Basan and H. Levine, Euro. Phys. J.: Special Topics 223, 1259 (2014), we perform a linear stability analysis on a two dimensional incompressible hydrodynamic model of an active fluid with an open interface. We categorise the stability of the model and find that for experimentally relevant parameters, fingering stability is always absent in this minimal model. Our results point to the crucial importance of density variation in the fingering instability in tissue regeneration.

9 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Flocks, herds, and schools: A quantitative theory of flocking
• Rheology of Active-Particle Suspensions
• Defect-mediated morphologies in growing cell colonies
• Biphasic, Lyotropic, Active Nematics
• Cell division: a source of active stress in cellular monolayers
• Surprising mappings of 2D polar active fluids to 2D soap and 1D sandblasting
• Critical Phenomenon of the Order-Disorder Transition in Incompressible Flocks

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Physical Models of Collective Cell Migration
• Emergence of active nematics in bacterial biofilms
• Active Fingering Instability in Tissue Spreading
• Uncovering novel phase transitions in dense dry polar active fluids using a lattice Boltzmann method
• Modeling growing confluent tissues using a lattice Boltzmann method: interface stability and fluctuations
• Universality in Incompressible Active Fluid: Effect of Non-local Shear Stress
• Leader-cell-driven epithelial sheet fingering