Percolation induced jamming transition of cancer cell monolayer

Chun-Yu Liu^1*, Lin I¹

¹Department of Physics and Center for Complex Systems, National Central University, Jhongli, Taiwan

* Presenter:Chun-Yu Liu, email:mhp850429@gmail.com

Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in many biological processes such as embryogenesis, tumorigenesis, and cancer metastasis. In this work, we experimentally investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of cancer cells (CCs) from the dilute state to the jammed confluent state. It is found that, with increasing time, CCs form a percolating cluster with increasing cell number through cell proliferation. The cancer cell cluster size distribution exhibits a gradual transition from a power law decay to the emergence of a sharp discrete tail with increasing power exponent. After the contact percolation of CCs, the number of cold spots with low cell speed increases. Jamming transition onsets as those cold spots form a large percolating cluster.

Keywords: Percolation, Cell monolayer, Cancer cell, Collective motion, Jamming transition