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Group advantage in chemotaxis of neural crest cells

Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery

Neural crest cells migrate rapidly over long distances during early embryonic development of vertebrates, and their migration has been much studied as a model for chemotaxis and cancer metastasis. A curious observation is the "group advantage": in a chemokine gradient too shallow to induce a single cell to chemotax, a cluster of cells can demonstrate robust chemotaxis up the gradient. In this talk, I will describe a model that explains this behavior based on cell-cell interaction. Through contact inhibition and co-attraction, the cells modulate each other's Rac1 and RhoA dynamics on their membranes and achieve a common polarity. This affords a group of cells much stronger persistence in their chemotaxis than a single cell against ambient noise.

Mathematics; Biology and other natural sciences; Partial differential equations; Mathematical biology

video/mp4

Author affiliation: University of British Columbia

2019-12-15

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/72750

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/