Neural Crest Collective Migration

Neural crest cells never migrate alone — they travel as directed streams held together by a balance of local repulsion and attraction. This simulation renders a population of neural crest cells as they stream up a diffusible chemoattractant gradient (analogous to SDF1/CXCL12), each cell obeying only local rules: contact inhibition of locomotion repolarises a cell away from any neighbour it touches, a shorter-range co-attraction signal keeps the group cohesive, and chemotaxis biases every cell's heading up the gradient. Tune each rule's strength independently and watch the population's directionality and cohesion emerge — or collapse — from purely local cell-cell interactions, with live readouts of mean speed, population directionality index and cumulative arrivals at the target zone.