Modeling collective cell motion in spatio-temporally varying electric fields

Understanding the motion of cells in response to their environment will help us learn more about biological processes like wound healing and cancer spread. Here we present a computational model to study the motion of a cluster of cells exposed to a spatially and temporally varying electric field. In this model, cells are represented as 2-dimensional disks, and their motion is restricted to a plane. We model a force exerted on each cell by the electric field, a cell-cell directional alignment for neighboring cells, and a repulsive force between overlapping cells which act in addition to the random motion isolated cells would experience. We compared our model with in-vitro experiments in which a cluster of 2000 Madin-Darby Canine Kidney (MDCK) cells were subject to a sudden 90^○ change in the direction of the applied electric field. Our model shows qualitative agreement with experimental results of cell trajectories and cell directionality over time. Our results suggest that the weight given to cell-cell alignment between neighboring cells is a key component giving rise to the experimentally observed time-dependent behavior of the directionality of cell cluster motion.