Travelling waves of phenotypically structured cell populations migrating into extracellular matrix

RebeccaCrossley

University of Oxford

"Travelling waves of phenotypically structured cell populations migrating into extracellular matrix"

Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in numerous biological processes, including cancer growth, wound healing, and the immune response. Often, the migrating population consists of cells with various different phenotypes. This study derives a general mathematical framework for modelling cell migration into the micro-environment, which is coarse-grained from an underlying individual-based model that captures some of the dynamics of cell migration that are influenced by the phenotype of the cell, such as: random movement, proliferation, phenotypic transitions, and interactions with the external environment. The resulting model provides a continuum, macroscopic description of cell invasion, which represents the phenotype of the cell as a continuous variable and is much more amenable to simulation and analysis than its individual-based counterpart when considering a large number of phenotypes. The results highlight how phenotypic structuring impacts the spatial and temporal dynamics of cell populations, demonstrating that different environmental pressures and phenotypic transition mechanisms significantly influence invasion patterns.
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