Jae Hun Kim, Adrian F Pegoraro, Amit Das, Stephan A Koehler, Sylvia Ann Ujwary, Bo Lan, Jennifer A Mitchel, Lior Atia, Shijie He, Karin Wang, Dapeng Bi, Muhammad H Zaman, Jin-Ah Park, James P Butler, Kyu Ha Lee, Jacqueline R Starr, Jeffrey J Fredberg
Each cell comprising an intact, healthy, confluent epithelial layer ordinarily remains sedentary, firmly adherent to and caged by its neighbors, and thus defines an elemental constituent of a solid-like cellular collective [1,2]. After malignant transformation, however, the cellular collective can become fluid-like and migratory, as evidenced by collective motions that arise in characteristic swirls, strands, ducts, sheets, or clusters [3,4]. To transition from a solid-like to a fluid-like phase and thereafter to migrate collectively, it has been recently argued that cells comprising the disordered but confluent epithelial collective can undergo changes of cell shape so as to overcome geometric constraints attributable to the newly discovered phenomenon of cell jamming and the associated unjamming transition (UJT) [1,2,5-9]...
November 4, 2019: Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications