Collective Behavior And Stigmergy Of Cancer Cells

University of Warwick Erasmus Mundus MSc in Complex Systems Science M1 project report Collective behaviour and stigmergy in populations of cancer cells Author: Supervisors: Jacopo Credi Prof. Jean-Baptiste Cazier Dr. Sabine Hauert Dr. Anne Straube June 18, 2015 Abstract Investigating and capturing the emergence of collective phenomena in cancer cell migration can advance our understanding of the process of tissue invasion, which is one of the first steps leading to the formation of metastases, or secondary tumours. By reconstructing the trajectories of lung cancer cells populations from microscopy image sequences, we were able to analyse their collective two-dimensional dynamics and measure the system spatial correlation function in different density conditions. This revealed that cancer cells, similarly to other recently studied biological systems, can exhibit a form of collective dynamics without global order. However, the observed density dependence of the correlation function differed completely from the theoretical predictions of standard models of moving particles with mechanisms of local alignment. We propose an explanation for this unexpected finding, supported by an analysis of the role of density in the ability of cells to communicate thro ugh the micro-environment (stigmergy), which revealed the emergence of a network-like structure of trails when the system density was sufficiently low. 1 Introduction modelling, driven by the massive amount of data produced in