MSC Seminar. 09/09/2024. Mingming Wu (Cornell University, USA): “Decoding physical principles of cell migration.”

In living systems, cells are constantly moving, sensing, adapting and migrating to where life is better. Bacteria move to where food is abundant for survival, immune cells migrate to where pathogenic attacks take place. A central question to cell migration is: can we predict where cells go next when subjected to a known physical and chemical environment? The answer to this question is important for solving a number of problems in health (e.g. cancer metastasis and wound healing) and environment (e. g. algal blooms). In this talk, I will illustrate a set of emerging principles that single and a group of cells use to migrate under controlled chemical and physical environment. We use microfluidics to build well defined environment for cells, and optical imaging to follow cell dynamics. When subjected to chemical gradients, we find that bacterial and animal cell follow the gradients via a ligand – receptor binding kinetics. When subjected to mechanical stresses, both cell types exhibit a much more complex behavior. In fluids, swimming cells  exhibit rheotaxis via hydrodynamic interactions. In biological matrices, they modify the matrix architecture to promote cell migration. I will use Escherichia coli bacteria and breast tumor cells as examples for these studies. Finally, I will  discuss about the challenges along the way formulating basic physical principles for cell migration, in particular, when cells are  surrounded by a physiologically realistic environment.