A density-independent glass transition in biological tissues

Dapeng Bi, J. H. Lopez, J. M. Schwarz, M. Lisa Manning

Published 2014-09-02Version 1

Cells must move through tissues in many important biological processes, including embryonic development, cancer metastasis, and wound healing. In these tissues, a cell's motion is often strongly constrained by its neighbors, leading to glassy dynamics. Recent work has demonstrated the existence of a non-equilibrium glass transition in self-propelled particle models for active matter, where the transition is driven by changes in density. However, this may not explain liquid-to-solid transitions in confluent tissues, where there are no gaps between cells and the packing fraction remains fixed and equal to unity. Here we demonstrate the existence of a different type of glass transition that occurs in the well-studied vertex model for confluent tissue monolayers. In this model, the onset of rigidity is governed by changes to single-cell properties such as cell-cell adhesion, cortical tension, and volume compressibility, providing an explanation for a liquid-to-solid transitions in confluent tissues.