Migration of breast cancer cells: understanding the roles of volume exclusion and cell-to-cell adhesion.

We study MCF-7 breast cancer cell movement in a transwell apparatus. Various experimental conditions lead to a variety of monotone and nonmonotone responses which are difficult to interpret. We anticipate that the experimental results could be caused by cell-to-cell adhesion or volume exclusion. Without any modeling, it is impossible to understand the relative roles played by these two mechanisms. A lattice-based exclusion process random-walk model incorporating agent-to-agent adhesion is applied to the experimental system. Our combined experimental and modeling approach shows that a low value of cell-to-cell adhesion strength provides the best explanation of the experimental data suggesting that volume exclusion plays a more important role than cell-to-cell adhesion. This combined experimental and modeling study gives insight into the cell-level details and design of transwell assays.