Polar pattern formation induced by contact following locomotion in a multicellular system

Abstract

AbstractBiophysical mechanisms underlying collective cell migration of eukaryotic cells have been studied extensively in recent years. One paradigm that induces cells to correlate their motions is contact inhibition of locomotion, by which cells migrating away from the contact site. Here, we report that tail-following behavior at the contact site, termed contact following locomotion (CFL), can induce a non-trivial collective behavior in migrating cells. We show the emergence of a traveling band showing polar order in a mutant Dictyostelium cell that lacks chemotactic activity. The traveling band is dynamic in the sense that it continuously assembled at the front of the band and disassembled at the back. A mutant cell lacking cell adhesion molecule TgrB1 did not show both the traveling band formation and CFL. We thus conclude that CFL is the cell-cell interaction underlying the traveling band formation. We then develop an agent-based simulation with CFL, which shows the role of CFL in the formation of traveling band. We further show that the polar order phase consists of subpopulations that exhibit characteristic transversal motions with respect to the direction of band propagation. These findings describe a novel mechanism of collective cell migration involving cell–cell interactions capable of inducing traveling band with polar order.