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Collective cell migration is essential for morphogenesis, tissue remodelling and cancer invasion. In vivo, groups of cells move in an orchestrated way through tissues. This movement involves mechanical as well as molecular interactions between cells and their environment. While the role of molecular signals in collective cell migration is comparatively well understood, how tissue mechanics influence collective cell migration in vivo remains unknown. Here we investigated the importance of mechanical cues in the collective migration of the Xenopus laevis neural crest cells, an embryonic cell population whose migratory behaviour has been likened to cancer invasion. We found that, during morphogenesis, the head mesoderm underlying the cephalic neural crest stiffens. This stiffening initiates an epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in neural crest cells and triggers their collective migration. To detect changes in their mechanical environment, neural crest cells use mechanosensation mediated by the integrin-vinculin-talin complex. By performing mechanical and molecular manipulations, we show that mesoderm stiffening is necessary and sufficient to trigger neural crest migration. Finally, we demonstrate that convergent extension of the mesoderm, which starts during gastrulation, leads to increased mesoderm stiffness by increasing the cell density underneath the neural crest. These results show that convergent extension of the mesoderm has a role as a mechanical coordinator of morphogenesis, and reveal a link between two apparently unconnected processes-gastrulation and neural crest migration-via changes in tissue mechanics. Overall, we demonstrate that changes in substrate stiffness can trigger collective cell migration by promoting epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in vivo. More broadly, our results raise the idea that tissue mechanics combines with molecular effectors to coordinate morphogenesis.

Evidence has been found that a biological tissue might behave like a liquid crystal. Even more remarkably, topological defects in this liquid-crystal system seem to influence cell behaviour. A materials physicist and a biologist discuss what the findings mean for researchers in their fields. See Letter p.212 Epithelial monolayers remove excess cells by extrusion. Benoit Ladoux and colleagues now report a purely mechanical route to cell extrusion at the site of topological defects within the cell monolayer. By modelling the epithelium as an active nematic liquid crystal, they show that cell extrusion is driven by stresses induced by distortions in cell orientation. Extrusion hotspots were controlled by geometrically inducing defects through microcontact printing of patterned monolayers. The authors also investigated the mechanotransductive effect of stress localization and found that signals related to cell death were induced at these sites of compressive stress. Additionally, tampering with the intercellular adhesion complexes led to a weakening of cell–cell interactions and resulted in an increased number of defects and extrusions. This finding is in line with nematic theory, which predicts that the number of topological defects is inversely related to the orientational elasticity.

Current models for protrusive motility in animal cells focus on cytoskeleton-based mechanisms, where localized protrusion is driven by local regulation of actin biochemistry1,2,3. In plants and fungi, protrusion is driven primarily by hydrostatic pressure4,5,6. For hydrostatic pressure to drive localized protrusion in animal cells7,8, it would have to be locally regulated, but current models treating cytoplasm as an incompressible viscoelastic continuum9 or viscous liquid10 require that hydrostatic pressure equilibrates essentially instantaneously over the whole cell. Here, we use cell blebs as reporters of local pressure in the cytoplasm. When we locally perfuse blebbing cells with cortex-relaxing drugs to dissipate pressure on one side, blebbing continues on the untreated side, implying non-equilibration of pressure on scales of approximately 10 µm and 10 s. We can account for localization of pressure by considering the cytoplasm as a contractile, elastic network infiltrated by cytosol. Motion of the fluid relative to the network generates spatially heterogeneous transients in the pressure field, and can be described in the framework of poroelasticity11,12.