Communication through autoattractants can enhance and limit collective migration of immune cells
David M. Versluis & Robert H. Insall
Tell your friends
Simulated immune cells break down an attractant (blue) as they follow it. When breaking down attractant, they can also produce autoattractant (green) that is also followed by cells. Four runs of the paper's model, from the same starting setup.
t = 0.0 h
attractantautoattractantcell
Keep it quiet
arrived0 / 40
Only the front-runners find the way.
Whisper
arrived0 / 40
The signal is too faint, cells only hear their neighbours, huddle up and stall.
Tell your friends
arrived0 / 40
Just the right signal: everyone arrives!
Shout loudly
arrived0 / 40
So much signal that many cells in the back can't tell which way to go.
Your turn
Play around with the parameters in a simplified version of the model recreated by an LLM to run in your browser. Note that this is not the same code as the paper, but it can show similar behaviours. Click the dish to restart.
Cell speed
Presets
Autoattractant removal
30 s4000 s
0 nM/s10 nM/s
0 / 40 in the bottom quarter · 0 min
Videos are based on new runs of the paper's original code, so do not match exactly with videos in the paper.