Scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia have, for the first time, devised a way to measure the forces that guide how cells migrate during collective cellular migration. Their surprising conclusion is that the cells fight it out, each pushing and pulling on its neighbors in a chaotic dance, yet together moving cooperatively toward their intended direction.
IBEC Barcelona notes:
The collaboration aimed to understand how the movement of each cell of a group determines mass migration, a mechanism intrinsic to processes such as tissue regeneration and cancer metastasis. “We had long suspected that each cell exerts force not only upon its extracellular matrix but also upon neighbouring cells,” explains IBEC group leader Xavier Trepat. Plithotaxis, which comes from the Greek plithos, meaning throng or swarm, describes what the scientists discovered when they devised a way to measure the forces that push and pull each cell alongside its neighbours in a chaotic ‘dance’, yet with the cell sheet moving along cooperatively in the desired direction. “When we think of collective processes in biology, we often imagine that the movement of each cell is perfectly synchronized with that of its neighbours, as if dancing a minuet,” adds Xavier. “By contrast, we found that this ‘dance’ is more like moshing: messy and violent.”
