Juxtacellular interactions play an essential but still not fully understood role in both normal tissue development and tumour invasion. Using proliferating cell fronts as a model system, we explore the effects of cell-cell interactions on the geometry and dynamics of these one-dimensional biological interfaces. We observe two distinct scaling regimes of the steady state roughness of in-vitro propagating Rat1 fibroblast cell fronts, suggesting different hierarchies of interactions at sub-cell lengthscales and at a lengthscale of 2--10 cells. Pharmacological modulation significantly affects the proliferation speed of the cell fronts, and those modulators that promote cell mobility or division also lead to the most rapid evolution of cell front roughness. By comparing our experimental observations to numerical simulations of elastic cell fronts with purely short-range interactions, we demonstrate that the interactions at few-cell lengthscales play a key role. Our methodology provides a simple framework to measure and characterise the biological effects of such interactions, and could be useful in tumour phenotyping.

中文翻译：

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细胞前沿增殖的粗糙度和动态作为细胞间相互作用的探针

邻近细胞的相互作用在正常组织发育和肿瘤侵袭中都起着至关重要的作用，但仍未被完全理解。使用增殖的细胞前沿作为模型系统，我们探索了细胞间相互作用对这些一维生物界面的几何形状和动力学的影响。我们观察到体外繁殖的Rat1成纤维细胞前沿的稳态粗糙度的两个不同的缩放机制，表明在亚细胞长度尺度和2--10个细胞长度尺度上相互作用的层次结构不同。药理学调制会显着影响细胞前沿的增殖速度，而那些促进细胞迁移或分裂的调节剂也会导致细胞前沿粗糙度的最快速发展。通过将我们的实验观察结果与具有纯短程相互作用的弹性单元前沿的数值模拟进行比较，我们证明了在少数单元长度尺度上的相互作用起着关键作用。我们的方法学提供了一个简单的框架来测量和表征此类相互作用的生物学效应，并且可能在肿瘤表型分析中很有用。