Eukaryotic chemotaxis

During eukaryotic chemotaxis, external chemical gradients guide the crawling motion of cells. This process plays an important role in a large variety of biological systems and has wide ranging medical implications. New experimental techniques including confocal microscopy and microfluidics have advanced our understanding of chemotaxis while numerical modeling efforts are beginning to offer critical insights. In this short review, we survey the current experimental status of the field by dividing chemotaxis into three distinct 'modules': directional sensing, polarity and motility. For each module, we attempt to point out potential new directions of research and discuss how modeling studies interact with experimental investigations. (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. WIREs Syst Biol Med 2009 1 141-149