Michael Barmann - Modeling Long-Range Cell Migration Via a Polarity Alignment Mechanism

UMass Applied Math PhD Student

Collective organization is an essential feature of biological systems that we witness every day: birds fly in flocks, insects migrate in swarms, fish swim in schools. At the cellular level, collective organization is just as ubiquitous and complex: Dictyostelium discoideum cells aggregate to form slime mold; pigment cells in zebra fish organize themselves to give rise to brightly colored stripes; and neural crest cells migrate in groups during embryonic development to form the nervous system.

In this talk, I will discuss a model for collective cell migration put forth by Shreyas Waghe (2024), which attempts to capture the long-range migration of cells via a polarity alignment mechanism. Through analysis and numerical simulation of the model, we gain some insight into the biological conditions that give rise to various collective behaviors—migration with clustering, migration without clustering, static clusters—and an understanding of how polarity alignment drives migration. Finally, I will address some challenges posed by this model and briefly discuss current work in this direction.