Abstract
We have been studying the response of neural crest cells from 56-h-old quail embryos to small, imposed d.c. electrical fields. These cells exhibit directed translocation or galvanotaxis towards the negative pole of fields as low as 7 mV/mm. With an average cell length of 60 µm, these cells respond to fields as low as 0.4 mV along their length. A significant change in the average cosine of the cellular translocation distribution can be detected as early as 7 min after field application for all field strengths greater than 10 mV/mm. Extracellular Ca2+ is not required for the motility of these cells as long as extracellular Mg2+ is increased to 10 mM. However, the galvanotaxis response does appear to require Ca2+ influx since it is completely blocked by the addition of either 10 mM Mg2+ or 100 µM Gd3+. Moreover, the galvanotaxis response is partially reversed by the complete removal of extracellular Ca2+.
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