Cell Migration Consortium

Migration is a pivotal process in many phenomena including embryonic development, cancer, inflammation, and wound repair. Understanding the mechanisms of cell migration present a formidable challenge, since it is comprised of several complex cellular processes coordinated in space and time. The Cell Migration Consortium is a highly interactive, multidisciplinary effort focused on bringing novel technical and intellectual solutions to the barriers to progress in migration research. It is organized into interdisciplinary Initiatives, virtual collaborative laboratories, focused on developing enabling technologies, reagents and models to address these barriers to progress. In the Consortium's next phase the emphasis will shift from technology development to its use in addressing major questions in the field. The Consortium goals are: to determine, identify, catalogue, and characterize the migration proteome, 2) formulate mathematical models to describe the steps in migration and integrate them into a comprehensive model of migration, 3) establish reagents and methods to measure, activate, and inactivate local signals that regulate migration, 4) determine the structures of the large multi-molecular machines that drive migration, and 5) promote migration research in the community and lower barriers for entry into the field. To achieve these goals enabling technologies developed by the individual Initiatives will be shared across the Consortium via inter-Initiative collaborations both inside and outside the migration community. The Consortium is organized into 7 Initiatives. Proteomics (mass spectrometry based analyses of phosphorylation and binding partners), Discovery (expression assays to identify migration molecules in several organisms), Transgenic and Knockout Mouse (production of conditional knockout and RNAi knockdown mice), Structure (determination of high resolution structures of migration complexes), Biosensors (development and application of new biosensors to measure spatial signaling), Imaging and Photomanipulation (development and application of photoactivation, photoinactivation, traction force assays, and correlation microscopy), Modeling (develop mathematical models of cell migration), and a Data Coordination and Dissemination Core (organize information for the Consortium and the community. The Consortium resources will be disseminated to the Community via the Cell Migration Gateway, a collaboration with the Nature Publishing Group.