Plithotaxis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In cellular biology, plithotaxis (from Greek πλήΘος (plíthos) 'crowd, swarm') is the tendency for each individual cell within a monolayer to migrate along the local orientation of the maximal principal stress, or equivalently, minimal intercellular shear stress.[1][2][3] Plithotaxis requires force transmission across many cell-cell junctions and therefore is an emergent property of the cell group.
Plithotaxis is found to hold at the level of both a subcellular grid point and an individual cell of a confluent monolayer, and the stresses must be tensile.[4]
