4 Year Wellcomne Trust PhD Programme: Modelling of collective cell migration

Collective cell migration – a process in which cohorts of cells move as a group while maintaining their mutual connections with each cell coordinating its movement with its neighbours – is a fundamental process in development and tissue regeneration. Aberrations that lead to cells acquiring migratory abilities, known as invasion, are displayed in many invasive tumour types. At the cell level, molecular processes that control cell’s migratory properties are related to the cytoskeleton, i.e., mainly to the actomyosin network and signalling pathways that control it. While there has been recent progress in our understanding how such molecular processes coordinate over multi-cellular scales, many questions still remain open. In vitro experiments on epithelial tissue monolayers show remarkable collective motion patterns that are correlated over distances that span ten or more cells. These patterns are robust and often do not depend on the specific cell type, but are related to the mechanical properties such as cell density or substrate stiffness. This suggests that at meso-scales collective cell behaviour is controlled by a set mechanical principles and a small number of parameters. If we are to fully understand how cells coordinate their motion at the level of the entire tissue, it is not sufficient to only study molecular processes, i.e. instead of trying to identify how one specific molecule might affect one specific