Cell Migration

Cell migration is a dynamic, ubiquitous cellular behavior-and understanding it is advancing at an exceptional pace. This Perspectives in Biology volume aims to capture the field's breadth and depth, organizing chapters that span mechanisms of single-cell motility, the regulation of collective migration and tissue-scale dynamics, emerging experimental technologies, and computational approaches that generate predictive models and spark new questions. The chapters first address core principles that underlie movement: how cells establish polarity and memory, how adhesion and traction couple to cytoskeletal force transmission, and how signaling networks balance excitability and inhibition. Subsequent sections explore collective migration-how groups of cells sense, communicate, and coordinate to navigate complex environments, the benefits of moving together, and how tissues remodel and regulate these processes. A section on novel approaches showcases recent technological innovations and experimental tools, each revealing new facets of cell motility. Complementing these advances, the volume surveys computational and mathematical models applied across diverse cell types, highlighting the insights they have delivered, and looks ahead to future directions, including the integration of machine learning. By bringing together shared and context-specific mechanisms of cell movement, state-of-the-art experimental methods, and quantitative and computational strategies for generating and testing hypotheses, this volume defines our current understanding of eukaryotic cell migration, identifies compelling directions for the field, and suggests ways this knowledge can be translated into therapeutic benefit.