have now combined genetics, cell biology and computational approaches to study how groups of the mutant Dicty cells migrate together. However, it remains unclear how this collective behavior works. This movement resembles a type of collective motion that has previously been observed in physics experiments using self-propelled particles. Mutant Dicty cells that lack these chemical signal processes can still move together as a band that travels across a surface. Chemical signals coordinate how the cells collectively migrate to form the multicellular slug. Individual Dicty cells may live alone but sometimes many cells come together to form a larger mobile structure called a “slug”. This collective cell migration plays crucial roles in many processes in animals such as forming organs and limbs, and healing wounds.Ī soil-dwelling amoeba called Dictyostelium discoideum – or just Dicty for short – is commonly used as a model to study how groups of cells migrate collectively. The cells of animals and many other living things are able to migrate together in groups. These findings describe a novel mechanism of collective cell migration involving cell–cell interactions capable of inducing traveling band with polar order. We further show that the polar order phase consists of subpopulations that exhibit characteristic transversal motions with respect to the direction of band propagation. We find that CFL is the cell–cell interaction underlying this phenomenon, enabling a theoretical description of how this traveling band forms. We show the emergence of a traveling band showing polar order in a mutant Dictyostelium cell that lacks chemotactic activity. Here, we report that tail-following behavior at the contact site, termed contact following locomotion (CFL), can induce a non-trivial collective behavior in migrating cells. One mechanism that induces cells to correlate their motions is contact inhibition of locomotion, by which cells migrating away from the contact site. Biophysical mechanisms underlying collective cell migration of eukaryotic cells have been studied extensively in recent years.

Locomotion band ct