Intercellular friction and motility drive orientational order in cell monolayers

Significance Understanding the mechanisms underlying pattern formation and flow in biological tissues is important in embryology and disease. An enigmatic observation in this field is the spontaneous emergence of nematic order in monolayers of nearly isotropic cells. Here, we propose a mechanism for the simultaneous origin of both local nematic and hexatic order. We show that the interplay between cell motility and intercellular friction yields macroscopic spatiotemporal correlations in multicellular flow, which deform and align cells. Our simulations also reveal that cellular geometry implies a fundamental relation between hexatic and nematic defects, which colocalize with cell–cell overlaps and may create hotspots for cellular extrusion.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

• Publication date

  2023-10-31

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1073/pnas.2319310121arXiv 2310.20465PMID 39302997PMCID 11459176
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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