General Biology Seminar

Effective collective cell movements require cell-cell communication to define one or a few leader cells that direct the migration process. Indeed, the restriction of the migratory activity to a few cells avoids that opposite forces are generated that would impaired global movements. Our knowledge of the mechanism that restrict cellular motility to leader cells is incomplete. By using border cell migration in the Drosophila egg chamber, we recently showed that vesicular trafficking plays a fundamental role in the establishment of a polarity that spread across a group of cell. Furthermore, we identified the small GTPase Rab11 as a key regulator of the cell communication mechanism restricting Rac activity and hence protrusions formation to the leader cell. We found that Rab11 acts on the actin and plasma membrane binding protein Moesin, by localizing the active, phosphorylated form of Moesin at the periphery of the border cell cluster. These results will be presented together with recent developments regarding the role of vesicular trafficking during collective cell migration.