CANCELLED Applied Seminar - Optimising collective cell guidance during tissue repair, Dr Shiladitya Banerjee (University College London) Seminar

 

During morphogenesis, wound healing, and apoptosis, closure of tissue gaps is essential for maintaining tissue mechanical integrity. Depending on the environment, wound repair is mediated by protrusive cell crawling, or by active contraction of a multicellular actomyosin cable at the wound edge. While both these mechanisms co-exist, it remains poorly understood how they collectively regulate directed cell guidance and wound healing efficiency under diverse intrinsic and extrinsic conditions. In this talk, I will introduce a cell-based computational model for wound repair in adherent cell monolayers that allows us to selectively control cell and substrate physical properties, tissue mechanics, wound geometry, as well as active cellular processes. By systematically varying physical and biochemical properties of the tissue and the extracellular matrix, we show that a combination of collective cell crawling and purse-string based contraction always accelerates the rate of wound repair. We demonstrate that efficient wound repair arises from a tradeoff between directed cell guidance at the wound leading edge and local tissue rearrangements. Our work suggests that tissue mechanical properties play an important role in optimizing active forces during tissue regeneration and repair.