Cellular motility articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • News & Views |

    Orderly or coherent multicellular flows are fundamental in biology, but their triggers are not understood. In epithelial tissues, the tug-of-war between cells is now shown to lead to intrinsic asymmetric distributions in cell polarities that drive such flows.

    • Guillermo A. Gomez

  • News & Views |

    Regenerative animals accurately regrow lost appendages. Now, research suggests that mechanical waves propagating from the amputation edge have a key role in this process.

    • Yutaka Matsubayashi

  • News & Views |

    The two-component bacterial MinDE protein system is the simplest biological pattern-forming system ever reported. Now, it establishes a mechanochemical feedback loop fuelling the persistent motion of liposomes.

    • Kerstin Göpfrich

  • News & Views |

    Developing tissues undergo collective cell movement and changes to their material properties, such as flow characteristics. Now tissue fluidity is linked to tissue growth.

    • Asako Shindo

  • News & Views |

    Epithelial tissues cover our organs and play an important role as physical barriers. The conditions leading to spontaneous hole formation in monolayer epithelia, which challenge epithelial integrity, have now been revealed.

    • Tatiana Merle
    •  & Magali Suzanne

  • Article |

    Cervix and breast carcinomas are highly heterogeneous in their mechanical properties across scales. This heterogeneity provides the tumour with stability and room for cell motility.

    • Thomas Fuhs
    • , Franziska Wetzel
    •  & Josef A. Käs

  • Article |

    Living cells change their behaviour in response to the viscosity of the medium surrounding them. An in vitro study shows that cells spread wider and move faster in a highly viscous medium, provided they have an actively ruffling lamellipodium.

    • Matthew Pittman
    • , Ernest Iu
    •  & Yun Chen

  • News & Views |

    Individual cilia are typically attached to cell surfaces, where they sweep back and forth. A new study charts the behavioural space of the beating patterns of cilia isolated from the cell.

    • Kirsty Y. Wan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The beating of motile cilia arises from the collective action of hundreds of proteins. A study of the dynamics of cilia under different environmental and genetic conditions shows that the space of beating variations is low-dimensional.

    • Veikko F. Geyer
    • , Jonathon Howard
    •  & Pablo Sartori

  • Letter |

    Microswimmers tend to accumulate in regions where their speed is significantly reduced, but experimental and numerical evidence now points towards a viscophobic turning mechanism that biases certain microalgae away from high-viscosity areas.

    • Michael R. Stehnach
    • , Nicolas Waisbord
    •  & Jeffrey S. Guasto

  • Letter |

    Topological defects in active nematic systems such as epithelial tissues and neural progenitor cells can be associated with biological functions. Here, the authors show that defects can play a role in the layer formation of the soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus.

    • Katherine Copenhagen
    • , Ricard Alert
    •  & Joshua W. Shaevitz

  • Letter |

    Bacteria are able to move as vast, dense collectives. Here the authors show that slow movement is key to this collective behaviour because faster bacteria cause topological defects to collide together and trap cells in place.

    • O. J. Meacock
    • , A. Doostmohammadi
    •  & W. M. Durham

  • Letter |

    Bacteria live in heterogeneous environments, so it is important to investigate their behaviour in porous media. Here the authors show that flow disorder enhances the effect of chemical gradients in micropockets in a porous medium, which then aid the transport of bacteria.

    • Pietro de Anna
    • , Amir A. Pahlavan
    •  & Ruben Juanes

  • Article |

    Symmetry breaking is essential for polarization of cells and generation of left–right body asymmetry. Here the authors investigate the arrangement of hair cells in zebrafish and show that mirror-symmetric patterns arise from a combination of biochemical and mechanical symmetry-breaking events.

    • A. Erzberger
    • , A. Jacobo
    •  & A. J. Hudspeth

  • Letter |

    The motor protein dynein is associated with microtubule force generation in the cell; how it interacts with cytoskeletal fluctuations is still an open question. Here the authors show that dynein can harness these fluctuations to generate power and move faster towards the minus-end of microtubules.

    • Yasin Ezber
    • , Vladislav Belyy
    •  & Ahmet Yildiz

  • News & Views |

    A two-state hopping experiment combined with a dynamical systems model reveals that cancer cells are deterministically driven across barriers, whereas normal cells cross only with the help of stochastic fluctuations.

    • Ulrich S. Schwarz

  • News & Views |

    Many microorganisms use light-sensitive receptors to migrate. A case in point is the microalga Euglena gracilis, which avoids light intensity increases by swimming in polygonal trajectories — providing an elegant solution to navigational challenges.

    • Nicolas Waisbord
    •  & Jeffrey S. Guasto

  • News & Views |

    Cells in embryonic tissues generate coordinated forces to close small wounds rapidly without scarring. New research shows that large cell-to-cell variations in these forces are a key system feature that surprisingly speeds up wound healing.

    • M. Shane Hutson

  • News & Views |

    Streams of motile cells appear in both healthy development and the evolution of tumours. A study of cells under lateral confinement now suggests their activity plays a key role in triggering these flows.

    • Francesc Sagués

  • Letter |

    Antiparallel streams of nematically oriented cells arise in both embryonic development and cancer. In vitro experiments and a hydrodynamic active gel theory suggest that these cells are subject to a transition that is driven by their activity.

    • G. Duclos
    • , C. Blanch-Mercader
    •  & P. Silberzan

  • Article |

    Interactions between cells can affect the way they migrate, impacting processes like cancer invasion and wound healing. Experiments on cell colonies of moderate density show that these interactions can enhance motility by increasing persistence.

    • Joseph d’Alessandro
    • , Alexandre P. Solon
    •  & Charlotte Rivière

  • Letter |

    Spindle-shaped cells readily form nematic structures marked by topological defects. When confined, the defect distribution is independent of the domain size, activity and type of cell, lending a stability not found in non-cellular active nematics.

    • Guillaume Duclos
    • , Christoph Erlenkämper
    •  & Pascal Silberzan

  • Article |

    Cell motility is typically described as a random walk due to the presence of noise. But a dynamical model suggests that dendritic cells move deterministically, alternating between fast and slow motility, and exhibiting periodic polarity reversals.

    • Ido Lavi
    • , Matthieu Piel
    •  & Nir S. Gov

  • Letter |

    Hydrodynamic coupling induces a vortex state in bacterial populations. Microfluidic experiments and modelling now demonstrate that lattices of these vortices can self-organize into patterns characterized by ferro- and antiferromagnetic order.

    • Hugo Wioland
    • , Francis G. Woodhouse
    •  & Raymond E. Goldstein

  • Article |

    Cells moving in a tissue undergo a rigidity transition resembling that of active particles jamming at a critical density—but the tissue density stays constant. A new type of rigidity transition implicates the physical properties of the cells.

    • Dapeng Bi
    • , J. H. Lopez
    •  & M. Lisa Manning

  • News & Views |

    A cable-like ring of biopolymers helps to pull cells together across the site of a wound. Widely thought to be homogeneous, the traction forces involved are actually remarkably heterogeneous — revealing an unexpected pattern of force generation during wound repair.

    • Miranda V. Hunter
    •  & Rodrigo Fernandez-Gonzalez

  • Article |

    Wound repair is thought to involve cell migration and the contraction of a tissue-level biopolymer ring—invoking analogy with the pulling of purse strings. Traction-force measurements now show that this ring engages the tissue's surroundings to steer migration, prompting revision of the purse-string mechanism.

    • Agustí Brugués
    • , Ester Anon
    •  & Xavier Trepat

  • News & Views |

    In their search for more favourable environments bacteria choose new directions to explore, usually at random. In a marine bacterium with a single polar flagellum it is now shown that this quest is enhanced by a buckling instability.

    • Howard C. Berg

  • Letter |

    Buckling is often regarding as a form of mechanical failure to be avoided. High-speed video microscopy and mechanical stability theory now show, however, that bacteria use such processes to their advantage. Cells propelled with a single flagellum change direction with a flick-like motion that exploits a buckling instability.

    • Kwangmin Son
    • , Jeffrey S. Guasto
    •  & Roman Stocker

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