Systemic migrations in enucleated cells

Abstract

Directional locomotion is a fundamental characteristic of many cells with great relevance in essential physiological and human pathological processes. For decades, research efforts have focused on studying specific individual processes and their corresponding biomolecular components involved in cellular locomotion movements. However, the notion that migratory displacements are functionally integrated and regulated at the systemic level has never been recognized. Recently, we have shown that locomotion movements correspond to an emergent systemic behavior which depends on a complex integrated self-organized system carefully regulated at a global cellular level. Here, to study the forces driving the locomotion movement of the cell, and to corroborate the thesis on the systemic character of the cellular migratory responses we have carried out an extensive study of locomotion movements with enucleated cells (cytoplasts) belonging to Amoeba proteus. The migratory behavior of both enucleated and non-enucleated cells has been individually studied in four different scenarios: in absence of stimuli, under a galvanotactic field, in chemotactic gradient, and under very complex conditions such as simultaneous galvanotactic and chemotactic stimuli. All these experimental displacement trajectories, obtained on flat two-dimensional surfaces, have been analyzed using advanced non-linear quantitative approaches. Our results show that both non-enucleated amoebas and cytoplasts display the same complex kind of dynamic structure in their migratory trajectories. The locomotion displacements of enucleated cells are regulated by complex self-organized integrative dynamics, modulated at a global-systemic level which seems to depend on the cooperative interaction of most, if not all, molecular components of cells.