Journal
JOURNAL OF CELL SCIENCE
Volume 124, Issue 7, Pages 1017-1021Publisher
COMPANY OF BIOLOGISTS LTD
DOI: 10.1242/jcs.080853
Keywords
Wound healing; Collective migration; Cell mobilisation; Myosin II
Categories
Funding
- Wellcome Trust
- Yamada Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Collective cell migration is absolutely essential for a wide variety of physiological episodes including the re-epithelialisation component of tissue repair. However, the investigation of such processes has been frustrated by difficulties in quantitatively analysing the behaviours of a large body of cells within a migrating epithelial sheet, which previously required manually tracking a large number of individual cells, or using advanced computational techniques. Here, we describe a novel and simpler image subtraction method with which we can visualise and quantify collective cell mobilisation as a 'white wave' that propagates back from the leading edge of a scratch-wounded monolayer of cultured epithelial cells. Using this technique, we show that actomyosin constriction negatively regulates cell mobilisation and that the advancement of cell sheets and the mobilisation of rows of cells behind their leading edges are independently regulated. We also show that there is a finite limit to the number of rows of cells mobilised after wounding. Moreover, our data suggest that enhancing cell mobilisation, by release from myosin II contractility, accelerates the healing of large wounds in the long term, thus raising the possibility that the cell mobilisation 'wave' we reveal here might be a therapeutic target for improving wound healing.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available