Problems in biology with many scales of length: Cell-cell adhesion and cell jamming in collective cellular migration.

Abstract As do all things in biology, cell mechanosensation, adhesion and migration begin at the scale of the molecule. Collections of molecules assemble to comprise microscale objects such as adhesions, organelles and cells. And collections of cells in turn assemble to comprise macroscale tissues. From the points of view of mechanism and causality, events at the molecular scale are seen most often as being the most upstream and, therefore, the most fundamental and the most important. In certain collective systems, by contrast, events at many scales of length conspire to make contributions of equal importance, and even interact directly and strongly across disparate scales. Here we highlight recent examples in cellular mechanosensing and collective cellular migration where physics at some scale bigger than the cell but smaller than the tissue – the mesoscale – becomes the missing link that is required to tie together findings that might otherwise seem counterintuitive or even unpredictable. These examples, taken together, establish that the phenotypes and the underlying physics of collective cellular migration are far richer than previously anticipated.