Chemotaxis by local steering

Chemotaxing cells have a defined front and back. Thus, movement models have always included explanations of how a single cell can integrate information about its surroundings and come up with a single answer about where the “front” is located. But now Cécile Arrieumerlou and Tobias Meyer (Stanford University, Stanford, CA) claim that it is local decisions about lamellar extension that matter.

Meyer says this idea “was really from watching cells in the microscope and seeing how they make direction changes. It was more consistent with stochastic, small turns than the cell knowing where the signal is located.” The biased random walk was driven by local lamellipod extensions, correlated with PI3P pulses, that spanned only a fraction of the total leading edge. Furthermore, the actions of the left and right of the...