They discover how cells control and govern their movements

Cell movement is a key and fundamental process for the development and optimal functioning of the human body. Cells move when an organism is developing embryonically, when a wound heals or during metastasis, for example. Errors during poor control of cell movement can have serious consequences in important diseases, such as Crohn’s disease, certain congenital brain disorders, and different immunological or vascular pathologies, for example.

In recent decades, various investigations have made it possible to identify different local mechanisms involved in cell movement, but despite the efforts made, it has not been possible to elucidate the essential question: how cells control and govern their movements.

Now, a new study shows that cell movements are driven by a previously unknown global mechanism.

The study is the work of a multidisciplinary team led by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

The team led by Ildefonso Martínez de la Fuente, from the UPV/EHU, has carried out an exhaustive analysis of the movement trajectories of 700 individual cells using advanced scientific techniques to demonstrate that their movements depend on the joint and self-organised action of practically all the physiological processes that make up the cell.

This multidisciplinary research, in which different UPV/EHU departments have participated, has demonstrated for the first time that cell movement is directed and regulated by a fundamental self-organized process that originates spontaneously in all living cells.

Ildefonso Martínez de la Fuente. (Photo: Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC))

According to Ildefonso Martínez de la Fuente, a researcher in the Department of Mathematics at the University of the Basque Country and a scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), “these self-organized molecular mechanisms make the different biochemical-metabolic processes that exist in the cell form a functional unit, totally integrated as a single whole, converting thousands of physiological processes into a single entity.” “It is a fundamental force that makes integrated behavior emerge in the cell,” says Martínez de la Fuente, “and it can be compared to the self-organized movement of thousands of starlings that form highly ordered and coordinated structures when they migrate, or even to the ability of ants to structure an anthill through self-organized collective behavior.”

This researcher highlights that it has never been scientifically recognised until now that the movement of cells is governed by self-regulated processes of a systemic nature that operate at a global level in the cell. “This scientific discovery adds a new perspective to the concept of the cell itself and its functional capacities,” he adds. Furthermore, “the combination of cell migration studies, from a systemic point of view, together with classic molecular studies, may be crucial for the development of a new generation of efficient therapies for pathologies related to diseases caused by deficient cell migration,” says Martínez de la Fuente.

“Discovering the molecular forces that direct cell migration represents a scientific challenge of enormous difficulty,” says the UPV/EHU researcher, “since in addition to creating complex special laboratory devices created specifically for this research, it has been necessary to use multidisciplinary techniques that allow combining experimental studies with advanced quantitative methods.”

“We studied the characteristics of the movement of 700 cells, and to do so we used techniques that are commonly used in statistical mechanics, which is a fundamental part of physics. Two of the methods we applied were developed by Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein. In addition, in this work we used the principles of dissipative self-organization — coherently organized structures — developed by Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine,” says Ildefonso Martínez de la Fuente.

The study is titled “Systemic cellular migration: The forces driving the directed locomotion movement of cells”. It has been published in the academic journal PNAS Nexus. (Source: UPV/EHU)