How Cells Find Their Way

Organisms need to sense their environment. By sensing, they can develop, heal wounds, protect against invaders, and create blood vessels. Chemotaxis, or directional sensing, allows cells to detect chemicals with exquisite sensitivity. Some chemotactic cells can sense chemical gradients that differ by only a few percent from a cell's front to its back. Although discovery of the molecule types involved in chemotaxis, as with other kinds of cell signaling events, has mounted, the details of how thi

Written byLaura Defrancesco

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The phenomenology itself is decades old. Neutrophil migration was observed in the early part of the 20th century, and was captured on film 50 years ago by the late David Rogers of Vanderbilt University. (Rogers' film can be viewed on the Web at: expmed.bwh.harvard.edu/projects/motility/neutrophil.html.) This film shows in dramatic fashion a neutrophil chasing a bacterium that is laying down a chemoattractant gradient--most likely the bacterial peptide f-MLP, which is induced by elements of the host immune system. A neutrophil tracks down the chemoattractant's source, moving in a polar fashion, leading with one end, retracting the other, and quickly changing course as the bacterium itself changes direction; all features of the chemotactic response that researchers are trying to get a handle on.

Genetic dissection of the protein pathways involved in slime mold chemotaxis is more advanced than neutrophils, since knocking out genes is relatively straightforward. Research on slime mold, for example, ...

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