Driving forces in cell migration and pattern formation in a soft tissue

Abstract: We give a description of cell diffusion in a soft tissue, paying special attention to the coupling of force, matter, and microforce balance laws through a suitable dissipation principle. To this end, we cast our framework into a multi-level schematics, comprising both kinematics and kinetics, based on a characterization of the free energy. We lay down first a force balance law, where force and stress fields are defined as power conjugate quantities to velocity fields and their gradients, then we give a species molar balance law, with chemical potential test fields, as power conjugate quantities to the rate of change of the species concentration, and finally a microforce balance law. The main feature of this framework is the constitutive expression for the chemical potential which is split into a term derived from the homogeneous convex part of the free energy and an active external chemical potential giving rise to the spinodal decomposition. The active part of the chemical potential is given an expression depending on the cell concentration and resembling the one defined in [Oster, Murray and Harris, J. Embryol. Exp. Morph. 78 (1983)], where it is meant to characterize an upward cell diffusion induced by cell motility. Further we show how an external vector field, entering the microforce balance law as a power conjugate quantity to the rate of change of the concentration gradient, can guide the diffusion process to a different limit stationary pattern. This vector field could possibly model any directional cue or bias characterizing the interaction of the migrating cells and the surrounding tissue.