Multi-scale cluster boundary evolution in cancer-endothelial cell mixture

Chun-Yu Liu^1*, Yun-Xuan Zhang¹, Hsiang-Ying Chen¹, Lin I¹

¹Department of Physics and Center for Complex Systems, National Central University, Jhongli, Taiwan

* Presenter:Chun-Yu Liu, email:mhp850429@gmail.com

We report the experimental observation of multi-scale collective motion and fractal-like pattern formation of clustering cancer cells in cancer-endothelia mixture (1:2 ratio), during the segregation process from dispersed cells to jammed monolayer. It is found that, with increasing waiting time, cancer cells gradually form larger clusters exhibiting multi-scale cluster boundaries with increasing fractal dimension. Cancer cells can move collectively inside small CC clusters, leading to fast cluster migration and the subsequent connection with other CC clusters. However, after cancer cells aggregating into large clusters, mutual coupling between cancer cells is not strong enough to maintain long range collective motion. Multi-scale collective cancer cell motion occurs in large clusters which further causes the fractal-like cluster boundary formation.

Keywords: Binary cell mixture, Collective motion, Pattern formation, Fractal dimension