Spatial heterogeneities shape the collective behavior of signaling amoeboid cells

Spatial and Functional Heterogeneities Shape Collective Behavior of Tumor-Immune Networks

Tumor growth involves a dynamic interplay between cancer cells and host cells, which collectively form a tumor microenvironmental network that either suppresses or promotes tumor growth under different conditions. The transition from tumor suppression to tumor promotion is mediated by a tumor-induced shift in the local immune state, and despite the clinical challenge this shift poses, little is...

Chemotactic signaling in mesenchymal cells compared to amoeboid cells

Collective behavior of brain tumor cells: the role of hypoxia.

We consider emergent collective behavior of a multicellular biological system. Specifically, we investigate the role of hypoxia (lack of oxygen) in migration of brain tumor cells. We performed two series of cell migration experiments. In the first set of experiments, cell migration away from a tumor spheroid was investigated. The second set of experiments was performed in a typical wound-healin...

Quantifying collective behavior in mammalian cells.

C ollective social behaviors generate one emergent response from many individual actors without central coordination: bees swarm, birds flock, and fish school. Singlecelled bacteria and amoebae collectively swarm, detecting chemical signals emitted by close neighbors to synchronize their motion. Within organisms, collective behaviors drive multicellular processes during migration and wound heal...

Hypoxia Induces a HIF-1-Dependent Transition from Collective-to-Amoeboid Dissemination in Epithelial Cancer Cells

Cancer metastases arise from a multi-step process that requires metastasizing tumor cells to adapt to signaling input from varying tissue environments [1]. As an early metastatic event, cancer cell dissemination occurs through different migration programs, including multicellular, collective, and single-cell mesenchymal or amoeboid migration [2-4]. Migration modes can interconvert based on chan...