Chemotaxis in the Model Organism Dictyostelium discoideum and Human Neutrophils

Copyright: © 2016 Xu X. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Chemotaxis is referred as directional cell migration guided by chemoattractant gradients and plays critical roles in many physiological processes, including neuron patterning [1], the recruitment of neutrophils to sites of inflammation [2], metastasis of cancer cells [3], and development of model organism Dictyostelium discoideum [4]. All eukaryotic cells detect chemoattractants by G proteincoupled receptors (GPCRs) and share remarkable similarities in the signaling pathways which control chemotaxis [5]. D. discoideum has been proven as a powerful model system to identify new components essential for chemotaxis. During postdoc training, I developed and applied the state-of-the-art live cell/single molecule imaging techniques to visualize spatiotemporal dynamics of GPCR-mediated signaling network that leads to the chemotaxis in D. discoideum [6,7]. The interplay between computational simulation and experimental verification, my studies have revealed a locally-controlled inhibitory mechanism in the GPCR signaling network upstream of PI3K [8]. Ras is a key component of the chemosensing machinery upstream of PI3K. My long-term research interests is to investigate molecular mechanisms underlining chemotaxis in multiple systems: first, identify novel components and signaling pathways essential for chemotaxis using model organism D. discoideum; next, understand the roles of their mammalian counter partners in mammalian systems to identify new therapeutic strategies for inflammatory diseases and metastasis of breast cancer.