During development and wound healing, cells need to form long-range ordered structures to ensure precise formation of organs and repair damage. This requires cells to locate specific partner cells to which to adhere. How such cell matching reliably happens is an open problem, particularly in the presence of biological variability. Here, we use an equilibrium energy model to simulate how cell matching can occur with subcellular precision. A single parameter—encapsulating the competition between selective cell adhesion and cell compressibility—can reproduce experimental observations of cell alignment in the Drosophila embryonic heart. This demonstrates that adhesive differences between cells (in the case of the heart, mediated by filopodia interactions) are sufficient to drive cell matching without requiring cell rearrangements. The biophysical model can explain observed matching defects in mutant conditions and when there is significant biological variability. Using a dynamic vertex model, we demonstrate the existence of an optimal range of effective cell rigidities for efficient matching. Overall, this work shows that equilibrium energy considerations are consistent with observed cell matching in cardioblasts and has potential application to other systems, such as neuron connections and wound repair.

中文翻译：

---

界面能量约束足以在远距离上对齐单元


在发育和伤口愈合过程中，细胞需要形成长程有序的结构，以确保器官的精确形成和修复损伤。这需要细胞找到要粘附的特定伴侣细胞。这种细胞匹配如何可靠地发生是一个悬而未决的问题，尤其是在存在生物变异性的情况下。在这里，我们使用平衡能模型来模拟细胞匹配如何以亚细胞精度发生。单个参数（封装选择性细胞粘附和细胞可压缩性之间的竞争）可以重现果蝇胚胎心脏中细胞排列的实验观察结果。这表明细胞之间的粘附差异（在心脏的情况下，由丝状伪足相互作用介导）足以驱动细胞匹配，而无需细胞重排。生物物理模型可以解释在突变条件下以及何时存在显着生物变异性时观察到的匹配缺陷。使用动态顶点模型，我们证明了有效匹配的最佳单元刚度范围的存在。总体而言，这项工作表明，平衡能量考虑与在成心细胞中观察到的细胞匹配一致，并且可能应用于其他系统，例如神经元连接和伤口修复。