Abstract
The coordinated motion of a cell is fundamental to many important biological processes such as development, wound healing, and phagocytosis. For eukaryotic cells, such as amoebae or animal cells, the cell motility is based on crawling and involves a complex set of internal biochemical events. A recent study reported very interesting crawling behavior of single cell amoeba: in the absence of an external cue, free amoebae move randomly with a noisy, yet, discernible sequence of ‘run-and-turns’ analogous to the ‘run-and-tumbles’ of swimming bacteria. Interestingly, amoeboid trajectories favor zigzag turns. In other words, the cells bias their crawling by making a turn in the opposite direction to a previous turn. This property enhances the long range directional persistence of the moving trajectories. This study proposes that such a zigzag crawling behavior can be a general property of any crawling cells by demonstrating that 1) microglia, which are the immune cells of the brain, and 2) a simple rule-based model cell, which incorporates the actual biochemistry and mechanics behind cell crawling, both exhibit similar type of crawling behavior. Almost all legged animals walk by alternating their feet. Similarly, all crawling cells appear to move forward by alternating the direction of their movement, even though the regularity and degree of zigzag preference vary from one type to the other.
Highlights
The crawling of cells plays a key role in biological development, wound healing, metastasis of cancer cells, and many other physiological and pathological processes
This study examined whether the observed zigzag crawling behavior and the long-range directional persistence of Dictyostelium amoebae can be a general property of any crawling cells
Both PMG and MG5 cells are neither purely diffusive nor ballistic objects but crawl with a long-range directional persistence. Their mean velocity distributions over *10 minutes show a non-Gaussian ‘hollow-shaped’ distribution in vx{vy space, which is an important characteristics that excludes two well-known models of random motion for the observed PMG cell trajectories, the worm-like chain model [22] and OrnsteinUhlenbeck (OU) model [27]. This is similar to the case of crawling Dictyostelium amoebae [15]
Summary
The crawling of cells plays a key role in biological development, wound healing, metastasis of cancer cells, and many other physiological and pathological processes. The process involves the complex coordination of a range of molecular events, including directed assembly of actin monomers, gelation process of actin filaments, formation of focal adhesion sites, disassembly of crosslinked network of actin filaments, and recycling monomeric actins [5,21,26]. The nexus of these molecular actions is coupled to the cell’s sensory systems, which recognize and interpret the various external cues from the environment. Of the two different origins, one may dominate over the other or both may play a significant role
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