TY - JOUR T1 - Interfacial energy constraints are sufficient to align cells over large distances JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/653535 SP - 653535 AU - S. Tlili AU - M. Shagirov AU - S. Zhang AU - T. E. Saunders Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/05/30/653535.abstract N2 - During development and wound healing, cells need to form long-ranged ordered structures to ensure precise formation of organs and repair damage. This requires cells to locate specific partner cells to which to adhere. How such cell matching reliably happens is an open problem, particularly in the presence of biological variability. Here, we use an equilibrium energy model to simulate how cell matching can occur with subcellular precision. A single parameter – encapsulating the competition between selective cell adhesion and cell elasticity – can reproduce experimental observations of cell alignment in the Drosophila embryonic heart. This demonstrates that adhesive differences between cells (in the case of the heart, mediated by filopodia interactions) are sufficient to drive cell matching without requiring cell rearrangements. The model can explain observed matching defects in mutant conditions and when there is significant biological variability. We also demonstrate that a dynamic vertex model gives results consistent with the equilibrium energy model. Overall, this work shows that equilibrium energy considerations are consistent with observed cell matching in cardioblasts, and has potential application to other systems, such as neuron connections and wound repair. ER -