Polar pattern formation induced by contact following locomotion in a multicellular system
Abstract
Biophysical mechanisms underlying collective cell migration of eukaryotic cells have been studied extensively in recent years. One mechanism that induces cells to correlate their motions is contact inhibition of locomotion, by which cells migrating away from the contact site. Here, we report that tail-following behavior at the contact site, termed contact following locomotion (CFL), can induce a non-trivial collective behavior in migrating cells. We show the emergence of a traveling band showing polar order in a mutant Dictyostelium cell that lacks chemotactic activity. We find that CFL is the cell–cell interaction underlying this phenomenon, enabling a theoretical description of how this traveling band forms. We further show that the polar order phase consists of subpopulations that exhibit characteristic transversal motions with respect to the direction of band propagation. These findings describe a novel mechanism of collective cell migration involving cell–cell interactions capable of inducing traveling band with polar order.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files. Source data files have been provided for Figure 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP17J05667)
- Masayuki Hayakawa
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP16K17777)
- Tetsuya Hiraiwa
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP19K03764)
- Tetsuya Hiraiwa
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP26610129)
- Hidekazu Kuwayama
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JP19H00996)
- Tatsuo Shibata
Japan Science and Technology Agency (JPMJCR1852)
- Tatsuo Shibata
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Hayakawa et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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