Modeling collective cell behavior in the presence of external stimuli

Controlling collective movement, arrangement and affecting proliferation of cell monolayers via external stimuli could be useful in organoid development, wound healing, and drug discovery research. A plethora of experiments have focused on these topics, here we present a computational model that simultaneously captures cell motility, division, and nematic order within the cell monolayer. We model different cells as self-propelled deformable ellipses that interact via a Gay-Berne potential. We perform 2D Monte-Carlo simulation in the presence of topographic patterns that induce topological defects and argue that a shape dependent mitosis mechanism is sufficient to explain monolayer density variations near defects of charge +1 and -1 observed in experiments by Serra group [1]. We then extend our model to address other types of guiding cues, such as electrical fields.

[1] K. D. Endresen, M. Kim, M. Pittman, Y. Chen, and F. Serra, Topological defects of integer charge in cell monolayers, Soft Matter (2021)