Image credit: Hayakawa et al. (CC BY 4.0)
The cells of animals and many other living things are able to migrate together in groups. This collective cell migration plays crucial roles in many processes in animals such as forming organs and limbs, and healing wounds.
A soil-dwelling amoeba called Dictyostelium discoideum – or just Dicty for short – is commonly used as a model to study how groups of cells migrate collectively. Individual Dicty cells may live alone but sometimes many cells come together to form a larger mobile structure called a “slug”. Chemical signals coordinate how the cells collectively migrate to form the multicellular slug. Mutant Dicty cells that lack these chemical signal processes can still move together as a band that travels across a surface. This movement resembles a type of collective motion that has previously been observed in physics experiments using self-propelled particles. However, it remains unclear how this collective behavior works.
Hayakawa et al. have now combined genetics, cell biology and computational approaches to study how groups of the mutant Dicty cells migrate together. The experiments showed that the traveling band is dynamically maintained by cells joining or leaving, and that this turnover is caused by simple interactions between the cells known as “contact following locomotion”.
Contact following locomotion has been also reported in mammalian cells so the findings of Hayakawa et al. may aid research into how animals develop and how errors in cell migration may lead to diseases. Further studies are required to find out whether other cells showing contact following locomotion also travel in a band.
