| Cell segregation is widespread phenomena in nature and has interested physicists since the last 50 years. It opens the possibility of studying a system composed of many interacting active identical elements both theoretically and experimentally. A first model used to explain cell segregation was based on the differential adhesion hypothesis(DAH)[1], quite similar to the phenomena involved in immiscible liquid separation. Despite the positive results found within DAH, a different experiment[2] based hypothesis suggested that tissue separation would be induced by differences in cell motility. In this work a self-propelled particle model is used to study cell sorting based on cell motility differences. It is an adaptation of the well known boids model introduced by Vicsek[3]. It allows to distinguish the influence of intrinsic cell motility from differential adhesion. Besides motility, the tendency of cells to actively follow their neighbors and movement persistence is also included in the model. Using three variants of the model, we map the conditions under which motility differences of cells belonging to different tissues may produce segregation and show that cell sorting exists in a wide range of parameters in three different models. |
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