Living cells usually stay put in their ‘assigned’ areas within an organism, but now and then, they start moving to ‘invade’ the surrounding areas. This happens for many reasons, for example, in wound healing or the metastatic spread of cancer.
Image credit: Elliot Bennett via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)
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In so-called ‘invasive migration,’ cells find themselves in dense molecular matrices that lend the elastic properties giving tissues their shapes and forms. Until now, these intricate cellular movements have been little understood.
Published in Cell Systems, researchers at Yale and the University of Minnesota (UMN) have discovered that a kind of molecular clock controls the migration of cells through confined spaces.
“We were surprised to find that cancer cells or cells that arose from healthy tissues moved in periodic steps,” said Andre Levchenko, Director of Yale’s Systems Biology Institute and lead author of the study.
Using diverse experimental techniques and modeling, Sung Hoon Lee, a postdoctoral associate in the Levchenko lab, worked with researchers at Yale and UMN to unravel the molecular network inside the cells and the carefully separated ‘beats’ controlling cell movement.
Offering potentially significant insight for future clinical interventions, the scholars found that they could adjust the frequency of the molecular clock, effectively speeding up or slowing down the moving cells, sometimes by as much as two or three-fold.
Source: Yale University