Andersen Benjamin H, Safara Francisco M R, Grudtsyna Valeriia, Meacock Oliver J, Andersen Simon G, Durham William M, Araujo Nuno A M, Doostmohammadi Amin
Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Departamento de Física, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal.
Nat Phys. 2025;21(4):618-623. doi: 10.1038/s41567-025-02791-2. Epub 2025 Mar 14.
The emergent dynamics of collective cellular movement are typically thought to depend on how cells interact with one another and the mechanisms used to drive motility, both of which exhibit remarkable diversity across different biological systems. Here we report experimental evidence of a universal feature in the patterns of flow that spontaneously emerge in groups of collectively moving cells. Specifically, we demonstrate that the flows generated by collectively moving dog kidney cells, human breast cancer cells and two different strains of pathogenic bacteria exhibit robust conformal invariance. We also show that the precise form of invariance in all four systems is described by the Schramm-Loewner evolution-a family of planar curves defined by a single parameter-and belongs to the percolation universality class. The presence of universal conformal invariance reveals that the macroscopic features of living biological matter exhibit universal translational, rotational and scale symmetries that are independent of the microscopic properties of its constituents. Our results show that flow patterns generated by different systems are highly conserved and that biological systems can be used to experimentally test predictions from the theories for conformally invariant structures.
集体细胞运动的涌现动力学通常被认为取决于细胞之间的相互作用方式以及用于驱动运动的机制，这两者在不同的生物系统中都表现出显著的多样性。在此，我们报告了集体移动的细胞群体中自发出现的流动模式具有普遍特征的实验证据。具体而言，我们证明了集体移动的犬肾细胞、人乳腺癌细胞和两种不同致病细菌菌株所产生的流动表现出强大的共形不变性。我们还表明，所有这四个系统中不变性的精确形式由施拉姆 - 洛厄纳演化描述——一族由单个参数定义的平面曲线——并且属于渗流普适类。普遍共形不变性的存在表明，有生命的生物物质的宏观特征表现出与其组成部分的微观性质无关的普遍平移、旋转和尺度对称性。我们的结果表明，不同系统产生的流动模式高度保守，并且生物系统可用于通过实验检验共形不变结构理论的预测。
