Sally Horne-Badovinac, PhD (Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology) is the senior researcher on a paper published in Developmental Cell about how cells communicate to move.
The paper details a discovery that Horne-Badovinac and her team made about cell movement and proteins in Drosophila cells. (Cells move for a variety of reasons: to close a wound, to form an organ during development, or to spread disease, like cancer.) Specifically, the presence of the protein Lar in a cell's leading edge causes the cell to slide that edge under the trailing edge of the cell in front of it, which contains the Fat2 protein. The trailing end of the front cell, signaled by the Lar in the rear cell, then retracts its trailing edge.
Horne-Badovinac notes that there is still much to explore in the way these proteins interact with each other.
Read the full article on Science Life.