Frustration and compromise in collectively moving cell clusters

Mechanically coupled, migrating clusters of cells mediate a variety of critical physiological processes such as embryonic development, wound healing and cancer metastasis. In this talk, I shall describe a few examples of our work on modeling such clusters, highlighting how frustration can arise at the group level because of heterogeneity in behavior among members of the cluster. I shall show how such frustrations may be resolved leading to new collective phases of motion. I shall connect our results to experimental observations of malignant lymphocytes undergoing chemotaxis showing that such phases can be functionally important – enabling, for example, robust chemotaxis and “load sharing” among cells in the cluster.