Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes

Cells in a tight spot: Learning the stochastic dynamics and cell-cell interactions of confined cell migration from data

Chase Broedersz

Abstract:

In many biological phenomena, cells migrate through confining environments. However, a quantitative framework to describe the stochastic dynamics of cell migration in confining environments remains elusive. We employ a data-driven approach to infer the dynamics of cell movement, morphology and interactions of cells confined in micropatterns. By inferring a stochastic equation of motion directly from the experimentally determined short time-scale dynamics, we show that cells exhibit intricate non-linear deterministic dynamics that adapt to the geometry of confinement. This approach reveals that different cell lines exhibit distinct classes of dynamical systems, ranging from bistable to limit cycle behavior. We extend this approach to interacting systems, by tracking the repeated collisions of confined pairs of cells. By inferring an interacting equation of motion for this system, we find that non-cancerous MCF10A cells exhibit repulsive and frictional interactions. In contrast, cancerous MDA-MB-231 cells exhibit attraction and a novel and surprising anti-friction interaction, causing cells to accelerate upon collision. Based on the inferred interactions, we show how our framework may generalize to provide a unifying theoretical description of diverse cellular interaction behaviors. Finally, I will discuss the collective dynamics of many cells migrating in curved confining geometries. Our framework could provide an important tool to characterize the system-level migratory dynamics of cells, biomolecular perturbations of the cellular migration and interaction machinery, and can be extended to describe more complex, collective migration processes.