RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 On the mechanism of long-range orientational order of fibroblasts
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 119669
DO 10.1101/119669
A1 Xuefei Li
A1 Rajesh Balagam
A1 Ting-Fang He
A1 Peter P. Lee
A1 Oleg A. Igoshin
A1 Herbert Levine
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/10/119669.abstract
AB Long-range alignment ordering of fibroblasts have been observed in the vicinity of cancerous tumors and can be recapitulated with in vitro experiments. However, the mechanisms driving their ordering are not understood. Here we show that local collision-driven nematic alignment interactions among fibroblasts are insufficient to explain observed long-range alignment. One possibility is that there exists another orientation field co-evolving with the cells and reinforcing their alignment. We propose that this field reflects the mechanical cross-talk between the fibroblasts and the underlying fibrous material on which they move. We demonstrate that this new long-range interaction can give rise to high nematic order and to the observed patterning of the cancer microenvironment.Significance Statement Long-range alignment patterns of fibroblasts have been observed both in vivo and in vitro. However, there has not been much understanding of the underlying mechanism. In this work, we demonstrate that these patterns cannot be simply explained by their steric interaction with one another during collisions. Instead, we propose that fibroblasts may collectively align through non-local interactions arising from their modification of an underlying extracellular matrix. The proposed mechanism explains the observed co-alignment between fibroblasts and collagen fibers around tumors and can be be tested in future experiments that can image the dynamics of this pattern formation in vivo or in vitro