Author: Jonas Ranft

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13:

In this thesis, we investigate the collective organization of cells by cell division and cell death. The multicellular dynamics of growing tissues is influenced by mechanical conditions and can give rise to cell movements. We develop a continuum description of tissue dynamics, which describes the stress distribution and the cell flow field on large scales. Cell division and apoptosis introduce stress sources that, in general, are anisotropic. We show that the tissue effectively behaves as a viscoelastic fluid with a relaxation time set by the rates of division and apoptosis. If the tissue is confined in a fixed volume, it reaches a state in which division and apoptosis balance. In this state, cells undergo a diffusive motion driven by the stochasticity of division and apoptosis. We calculate the diffusion coefficient and compare our results concerning both diffusion and viscosity to simulations of multicellular systems. Introducing a second material component that accounts for the extracellular fluid, we show that a finite permeability of the tissue gives rise to additional mechanical effects. In the limit of long times, the mechanical response of the tissue to external perturbations is confined to a region of which the size depends on the ratio of tissue viscosity and cell-fluid friction. Last but not least, we study the propagation of an interface between two different cell populations within a tissue. We distinguish two different modes of propagation of the more proliferative population: a diffusive regime in which relative fluxes dominate the expansion, and a propulsive regime in which the proliferation gives rise to dominating convective flows.