Assessing the connection between cellular rearrangements and local structure using information in models of biological tissues.*

The global dynamics of cells in dense confluent epithelial tissues are linked strongly to global structural properties. During embryonic development, cancer invasion and wound healing, such tissues can undergo a transition from a solid-like jammed state to a fluid-like unjammed state that is predicted by an average of cell shape. We push this further to use structural information to predict the mobility of individual cells, identifying a linear combination of local structural features, "softness," that is strongly predictive of cell rearrangements. We use an information-theoretic measure to quantify the extent to which softness determines impending topological rearrangements and combine it with isoconfigurational ensemble results to show that softness captures nearly all of the information about rearrangements that is obtainable from structure. This information is large in the solid phase of the model and decreases rapidly as state variables are varied into the fluid phase.

*I. Tah, T. A. Sharp, A. J. Liu and D. Sussman, arXiv, 2008.13702 (2020).