Lea Happel: Curvotaxis - The influence of curvature on (collective) cellular motion

Vortragender/Speaker: Lea Happel (IWR)
Ansprechpartner/Contact: Dr. Simon Praetorius
Video conference (BBB): (on request)

Titel/Title:
Curvotaxis - The influence of curvature on (collective) cellular motion

Zusammenfassung/Abstract:
Cells sense and respond to local curvature, essentially by aligning the filaments with the principal curvature directions. This influences not only the shape of single cells, it also plays an important role regarding cellular motion. For example recent experiments for cylindrical epithelial tissues of MDCK cells point to a strong connection between (extrinsic) curvature and collective cell rotation.

Mathematically this has been modelled by a coarse-grained continuous active polar gel model with ad hoc added linear curvature terms, but not by an agent-based model. We therefore propose a multiphase field model, which models each cell separately and hence takes cellular properties and cell-cell interactions into account, to close this gap and add a new part in the free energy for extrinsic curvature contributions. This extrinsic curvature energy is inspired by the theory of surface liquid crystals, where extrinsic curvature effects are well understood. We consider cylindrical shapes and compare our results with the experimental data of MDCK cells. Additionally we investigate the collective behavior of cells on different tori to take a first look into surfaces with non-constant Gaussian curvature.