Aggregation dynamics of active cells on non-adhesive substrate

Abstract: Cellular self-assembly and organization are fundamental steps for the development of biological tissues. In this paper, within the framework of a cellular automata model, we address how an ordered tissue pattern spontaneously emerges from a randomly migrating single cell population without the influence of any external cues. This model is based on the active motility of cells and their ability to reorganize due to cell-cell cohesivity as observed in experiments. Our model successfully emulates the formation of nascent clusters and also predicts the temporal evolution of aggregates that leads to the compact tissue structures. Moreover, the simulations also capture several dynamical properties of growing aggregates, such as, the rate of cell aggregation and non-monotonic growth of the aggregate area which show a good agreement with the existing experimental observations. We further investigate the time evolution of the cohesive strength, and the compactness of aggregates, and also study the ruggedness of the growing structures by evaluating the fractal dimension to get insights into the complexity of tumorous tissue growth which were hitherto unexplored.