Mechanical heterogeneity in tissues promotes rigidity and controls cellular invasion

Abstract

We study the influence of cell-level mechanical heterogeneity in epithelial tissues using a vertex-based model. Heterogeneity in single cell stiffness is introduced as a quenched random variable in the preferred shape index($p_0$) for each cell. We uncovered a crossover scaling for the tissue shear modulus, suggesting that tissue collective rigidity is controlled by a single parameter $f_r$, which accounts for the fraction of rigid cells. Interestingly, the rigidity onset occurs at $f_r=0.21$, far below the contact percolation threshold of rigid cells. Due to the separation of rigidity and contact percolations, heterogeneity can enhance tissue rigidity and gives rise to an intermediate solid state. The influence of heterogeneity on tumor invasion dynamics is also investigated. There is an overall impedance of invasion as the tissue becomes more rigid. Invasion can also occur in the intermediate heterogeneous solid state and is characterized by significant spatial-temporal intermittency.

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Shear-driven solidification and nonlinear elasticity in epithelial tissues
• Disentangling the Behavioural Variability of Confined Cell Migration
• Controlled neighbor exchanges drive glassy behavior, intermittency and cell streaming in epithelial tissues
• Differences in cell death and division rules can alter tissue rigidity and fluidization
• Rigidity of Epithelial Tissues as a Double Optimization Problem
• Discontinuous shear thickening in biological tissue rheology
• Origin of yield stress and mechanical plasticity in model biological tissues
• The cell adaptation time sets a minimum length scale for patterned substrates
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• Role of intercellular adhesion in modulating tissue fluidity
• Substrate disorder promotes cell motility in confluent tissues
• A Mechanistic Model of the Organization of Cell Shapes in Epithelial Tissues