"Taxis" control of directional cell movement in health and disease

Movement of cells taking place during embryonic development, in patho-physiological conditions or in diseased states (e.g., as a primary mode to generate cancer metastases), is likely to be the most complex process undertaken by a vertebrate cell. It requires and extreme coordination between the perception of extracellular signals and the intracellular translation of these signals into an orchestration of cell's locomotory machinery. It has become clear during the years that guidance of cell movement by external cues is dictated by control mechanisms operating at different cellular and subcellular, chemical, physical and molecular levels. To bring about a directional movement, a moving cell must assimilate intersected pieces of information provided by the ECM, in concert with ECM-bound and diffusible factors. Notably, the flow of information needed to guide movement is bidirectional as migrating cells modify their substrates in highly distinctive manner depending on whether moving collectively or as individual cells.



To gain a full understanding of how cell movement is regulated in time, space and in relation to the organism's needs, it is imperative to gain a comprehensive overview of the modalities through which structural-functional features of the microenvironment may impact on motile cells. Likewise, it is of paramount importance to establish how cells respond and adapt to these features. Diffusible factors may attract cells along a concentration gradient, i.e., "chemotaxis", while "haptotaxis" is defined as the ability of migrating cells to move along a concentration gradient of one or more ECM-associates components. Cell movement in response to a structured ECM substrate is defined as "topotaxis", meanwhile, the phenomenon of mechanotransduction allows yet another mode of control of directionality known as "durataxis". Cells may also be led in their movement by electric fields that are propagated through tissues and such mechanism is widely known as "galvanotaxis". It remains to be clarified how and when these different mechanisms may synergize or even antagonize each other to finetune directional cell migration. In other cases, the same mechanisms may act in a reversed manner as in the case of "chemorepulsion” or be overruled by cell-cell contact dynamics as those enforced by ephrins and their receptors.



The proposed Research Topic aims at collecting investigations presenting original experimental data or essays discussing our current knowledge about how different "taxis" may control direction of movement in time and space. Contribution are expected to provide novel insights into the inter-relationship of these diverse mechanisms and how they are brought about. Particularly challenging in this context is the elucidation of how cells perceive the entailed microenvironmental signals and how they may adjust to these signals in an autonomous way as single cells or more collectively as gropus of cells. Discovery of novel extracellular factors modulating "taxis" and cell surface molecules contributing to the perc

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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Cell migration, Chemotaxis, Haptotaxis, Durataxis, Topotaxis, Galvanotaxis, Mechanotransduction, Exosomes, Tunnelling microtubules, Extracellular Matrix, Cell-cell adhesion

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