Fig. 4: Turning off cell reversal enhances traction fluctuation and layer formation.
a Representative examples of layer-number fields for colonies of reversing (left) and non-reversing (right) cells. Yellow lines indicate the director field \(\hat{{{\boldsymbol{n}}}}\). The white scale bar is 10 μm. b Distributions of area fraction of regions with layer number ≥2 for reversing and non-reversing cells. Center line, median; box limits, upper and lower quartiles; whiskers, 1.5× interquartile range; points, outliers. We measured 10 biological replicates for the reversing cells (WT) and 16 biological replicates for the non-reversing cells (ΔfrzE). c Temporal auto-correlation functions of velocity Cv(t) (Eq. (8)) for reversing (turquoise) and non-reversing (magenta) cells. The shaded areas show one standard deviation for each cell type. The same colors are used in the following panels comparing these two strains. d Distributions of traction magnitude ∣T∣. The inset shows the same data in the log-linear scale. e Power spectral density of traction. The error bars show one standard deviation. The dashed line has a slope −1 and the dot-dashed line has a slope −2. The data in (c–e) are from 11 biological replicates for the reversing cells and 13 biological replicates for the non-reversing cells.
