Motility driven glassy dynamics in confluent epithelial monolayers

Abstract

As wounds heal, embryos develop, cancer spreads, or asthma progresses, the cellular monolayer undergoes a glass transition between solid-like jammed and fluid-like flowing states. During some of these processes, the cells undergo an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT): they acquire in-plane polarity and become motile. Thus, how motility drives the glassy dynamics in epithelial systems is critical for the EMT process. However, no analytical framework that is indispensable for deeper insights exists. Here, we develop such a theory inspired by a well-known glass theory. One crucial result of this work is that the confluency affects the effective persistence time-scale of active force, described by its rotational diffusivity, D^eff_r. D^eff_r differs from the bare rotational diffusivity, D_r, of the motile force due to cell shape dynamics, which acts to rectify the force dynamics: D^eff_r is equal to D_r when D_r is small and saturates when D_r is large. We test the theoretical prediction of D^eff_r and how it affects the relaxation dynamics in our simulations of the active Vertex model. This novel effect of D^eff_r is crucial to understanding the new and previously published simulation data of active glassy dynamics in epithelial monolayers.