CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The rational description of the growth dynamics of biological systems plays a key role in the understanding of many physiological and pathological processes as well as for designing improved strategies for disease treatments and tissue engineering applications. One approach has been the use of rather universal models commonly utilized for describing the front propagation of systems, irrespective of their nature. Cell trajectory, i.e., random or ballistic, have been demonstrated to affect the global cell colony dynamics and is useful to give physical meaning to the components of the proposed growth models. These models have been suggested to fall into the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) class. In this contribution we report results from tumor cell colony spreading under radial and linear geometry. For the latter we also perform cultures on ridge-patterned substrates with different orientations respect to the initial quasi-linear colony front. For quasi-radial cell colonies (QRCs) at the first stages of growth, the spreading kinetics in the presence of dispersing agents, namely epidermal growth factor, exhibits a clear influence of the increase in cell motility. Thus, the commonly used growth models are modified to properly describe the results. In other set of experiments, the colony front displacement velocity of initially quasi-linear colonies (QLCs) on smooth substrates remains constant irrespective of the presence or absence of Mitomycin C, a compound that inhibits cell proliferation. Finally, the front displacement velocity of QLCs spreading on ridge patterned substrates followed a quasi-quadratic relationship with the angle formed by the ridge direction and the normal to the colony front, in agreement with the KPZ standard equation. This behavior correlates with the enhanced cell motility at higher angles. To sum up, a bridge between the global dynamics and processes at the cellular level is possible through cell motility characteristics.