Departament de Física de la Matèria Condensada, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona 08028, Spain.
Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona 08028, Spain.
Soft Matter. 2017 Feb 8;13(6):1235-1243. doi: 10.1039/c6sm02188c.
Collective cell migration in spreading epithelia in controlled environments has become a landmark in our current understanding of fundamental biophysical processes in development, regeneration, wound healing or cancer. Epithelial monolayers are treated as thin layers of a viscous fluid that exert active traction forces on the substrate. The model is exactly solvable and shows a broad range of applicabilities for the quantitative analysis and interpretation of force microscopy data of monolayers from a variety of experiments and cell lines. In addition, the proposed model provides physical insights into how the biological regulation of the tissue is encoded in a reduced set of time-dependent physical parameters. In particular the temporal evolution of the effective viscosity entails a mechanosensitive regulation of adhesion. Besides, the observation of an effective elastic tensile modulus can be interpreted as an emergent phenomenon in an active fluid.
在受控环境中，铺展上皮细胞的集体细胞迁移已成为我们当前对发育、再生、伤口愈合或癌症等基本生物物理过程理解的一个里程碑。上皮单层被视为粘性流体的薄层，对基质施加主动牵引力。该模型是完全可解的，并为各种实验和细胞系的单层力显微镜数据的定量分析和解释提供了广泛的适用性。此外，所提出的模型提供了物理见解，说明组织的生物调节如何被编码在一组减少的随时间变化的物理参数中。特别是有效粘度的时间演化涉及到对粘附的机械敏感调节。此外，观察到有效弹性拉伸模量可以解释为活性流体中的一种突现现象。
