Research by two UNC chemists provides new information about how cells move. Cell motility plays a key role in human biology and disease, contributing to such important processes as embryonic development, wound repair and cancer metastasis.
The new findings by Garegin Papoian, assistant professor of chemistry in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Pavel Zhuravlev, a graduate student of chemistry, appear in the June 24 early edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Motile cells in tissues and the bloodstream carry out important biological functions. For example, some immune cells chase pathogens during infection. Cell motility also plays a key role in embryonic development. Despite their biological importance, the physical mechanisms driving these complex chemical processes are not well understood.
Papoian and Zhuravlev have developed a computational model of filopodia, the dynamic finger-like protrusions used by cells to guide motility.
The UNC research clarifies a number of important experimental observations, which were not understood before. Motile cells sense their environment by projecting long, snake-like filopodia to probe distant sites in the surrounding tissues. These projections are highly dynamic — they grow for some time, then retract, and then grow again. In their PNAS paper, Papoian and Zhuravlev found a molecular mechanism which may be responsible for this behavior.
The work by Papoian and Zhuravlev allows researchers to gain deeper insights into the molecular and physical interactions which drive complex biological processes. These insights are important from the biomedical perspective, since filopodia are misregulated in a number of diseases, including in metastatic cancer cells.
Papoian is the recent winner of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
CAREER awards support the research of promising young faculty in the early stages of their careers in the chemical and life sciences.
