Collective Cell Migration: Linking Interactions Between Local and Global Length Scales

Collective cell migration is important for development, tissue homeostasis, and invasion, but the underlying dynamics are still elusive. The objective of this work was to provide new insights by combining information from the local length scale (cell-cell interactions during rearrangement) with the global length scale (net dynamics of cellular streams). To analyze the local scale interactions, a Matlab GUI was developed to make the processing of movie frames possible, and additional scripts were created to convert cell pixel edges into vectorized edges, track the neighbouring cells over time. At the global scale, a hierarchal clustering method was adapted to determine if streaming cells were more likely to be paired, based on their movement signatures. We identified that cellular rearrangement is likely the rate limiting step affecting the collaborative behaviours of the cells and that cells in vitro exchange neighbours in a similar manner to that observed in vivo.M.A.S