Multicellular model of collective cell migration with an irregular free boundary

In many biological systems, including cancer, embryonic development and wound healing, cells migrate in a coordinated fashion. Interactions between individual neighbouring cells at a cellular scale leads to a collective movement at a tissue scale. Cell-based models allow cellular level processes to be explicitly incorporated and can allow us to investigate how tissue heterogeneities influence migration. Here we present our work using a vertex dynamics model to investigate the effect of an irregular free boundary on migration speed, cell density and orientation in a cell monolayer.