In cellular biology, plithotaxis (from Greek πλήΘος (plíthos) 'crowd, swarm') is the tendency for each individual cell within a monolayer to migrate along the local orientation of the maximal principal stress, or equivalently, minimal intercellular shear stress. Plithotaxis requires force transmission across many cell-cell junctions and therefore is an emergent property of the cell group. Plithotaxis is found to hold at the level of both a subcellular grid point and an individual cell of a confluent monolayer, and the stresses must be tensile.
See also Chemotaxis Durotaxis Haptotaxis Mechanotaxis
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