Universal Area Distributions in the Monolayers of Confluent Mammalian Cells

Abstract

When mammalian cells form confluent monolayers completely filling a plane, these apparently random "tilings" show regularity in the statistics of cell areas for various types of epithelial and endothelial cells. The observed distributions are reproduced by a model which accounts for cell growth and division, with the latter treated stochastically both in terms of the sizes of the dividing cells as well as the sizes of the "newborn" ones-remarkably, the modeled and experimental distributions fit well when all free parameters are estimated directly from experiments.