Molecular-scale substrate anisotropy and crowding drive long-range nematic order of cell monolayers

Abstract

The ability of cells to reorganize in response to external stimuli is important in areas ranging from morphogenesis to tissue engineering. Elongated cells can co-align due to steric effects, forming states with local order. We show that molecular-scale substrate anisotropy can direct cell organization, resulting in the emergence of nematic order on tissue scales. To quantitatively examine the disorder-order transition, we developed a high-throughput imaging platform to analyze velocity and orientational correlations for several thousand cells over days. The establishment of global, seemingly long-ranged order is facilitated by enhanced cell division along the substrate's nematic axis, and associated extensile stresses that restructure the cells' actomyosin networks. Our work, which connects to a class of systems known as active dry nematics, provides a new understanding of the dynamics of cellular remodeling and organization in weakly interacting cell collectives. This enables data-driven discovery of cell-cell interactions and points to strategies for tissue engineering.

29 pages, 7 figures

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• Non-equilibrium clustering of self-propelled rods
• Active matter
• Minimal model for active nematics: quasi-long-range order and giant fluctuations
• Defect dynamics in active nematics
• Enhanced diffusion and ordering of self-propelled rods
• Molecular-scale substrate anisotropy and crowding drive long-range nematic order of cell monolayers

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Molecular-scale substrate anisotropy and crowding drive long-range nematic order of cell monolayers
• Universal properties of repulsive self-propelled particles and attractive driven particles
• Data-driven model construction for anisotropic dynamics of active matter
• Power-law correlation in the homogeneous disordered state of anisotropically self-propelled systems
• Proliferating Nematic That Collectively Senses an Anisotropic Substrate
• The inverse Kalman filter
• Myofibroblasts slow down defect recombination dynamics in mixed cell monolayers