Discovery of a mechanism for determining the direction of collective cell migration

(National Institutes of Natural Sciences) The phenomenon of collective cell migration has been observed in the process of animal development, the healing of wounds, and cancer cell invasion. Professors Kazuhiro Aoki et al. of the National Institute for Basic Biology have found that when the activity of a molecule called ERK MAP kinase is propagated to neighboring cells, the cells migrate in the opposite direction of ERK propagation.