Event

Cell migration plays a central role in embryonic development, wound healing and immune surveillance. In 2008, Yoichiro Mori, Alexandra Jilkine and I published a model for the initial step of cell migration, the front-back chemical polarization that sets a cell's directionality. (More detailed mathematical properties of this model were described by the same group in 2011.) Since then, progress has been made in investigating how that simple "wave-pinning" mechanism is shaped and tuned by feedback from other proteins, such as actin, from the cell's environment (extracellular matrix), from interplay with larger signaling networks, and from cell-cell interactions. In this talk I will describe some of this progress, with emphasis on links to experiments on melanoma cell motility. If time permits, I will also briefly describe more recent work on collective cell migration that we are currently undertaking.