Soft yet sharp interfaces in a vertex model of confluent tissue

Abstract

How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the ability of cells to independently regulate adhesivity and tension, together with neighbor-based interaction rules, lets them support strikingly unusual interfaces. In particular, we show that mechanical- and fluctuation-based measurements of the effective surface tension of a cellular aggregate yield different results, leading to mechanically soft interfaces that are nevertheless extremely sharp.

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• Computational models for active matter
• Mechanical heterogeneity in tissues promotes rigidity and controls cellular invasion
• Anomalous glassy dynamics in simple models of dense biological tissue
• Capillary interfacial tension in active phase separation
• Classical Nucleation Theory for Active Fluid Phase Separation
• Active phase separation: new phenomenology from non-equilibrium physics
• Effect of cellular rearrangement time delays on the rheology of vertex models for confluent tissues
• The structural, vibrational, and mechanical properties of jammed packings of deformable particles in three dimensions
• Stability and roughness of interfaces in mechanically-regulated tissues
• Interface roughening in nonequilibrium phase-separated systems
• Interplay of curvature and rigidity in shape-based models of confluent tissue
• Tissue flow induces cell shape changes during organogenesis
• Alignment interactions drive structural transitions in biological tissues
• Coalescing Clusters Unveil New Regimes of Frictional Fluid Mechanics
• The cell adaptation time sets a minimum length scale for patterned substrates
• Interface dynamics of wet active systems
• Small-scale demixing in confluent biological tissues
• Geometric signatures of tissue surface tension in a three-dimensional model of confluent tissue
• Scanning-probe and information-concealing machine learning intermediate hexatic phase and critical scaling of solid-hexatic phase transition in deformable particles
• Scale-dependent sharpening of interfacial fluctuations in shape-based models of dense cellular sheets
• Substrate disorder promotes cell motility in confluent tissues
• Biomechanics of Collective Cell Migration in Cancer Progression -- Experimental and Computational Methods