International Workshop on Cell Migration
12 to 14 June, 2017
We are proud to announce the International Workshop on Cell
Migration (CellMig 2017), to be held in Porto Alegre, RS,
Brazil, from 12 to 14 June, 2017. This event belongs to a
series of satellite meetings of the 9th IUPAP International Conference on
Biological Physics (ICBP2017), to be held in Rio de
Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, from 5 to 9 June 2017. The workshop
will focus in experimental techniques, theory, and numerical
simulations on individual and/or collective cell migration,
spontaneuos or induced, in any dimension. The workshop will
include invited lectures, research presentations,
and a poster session. Due to space constraints, the number of participants will be limited to 60.
Description
Cell migration is ubiquitous and plays a key role in different processes. In embryogenesis, cells must migrate to different regions of the embryo, giving rise to the organs and tissues of the new being. In wound healing, the cells should migrate to the sites where the injured tissue should be reconstituted. In cancer, metastases occur by the migration of tumor cells to other sites of the affected organism. In all these cases, the interaction of the cells with their neighboring cells and with their environment can induce a collective behavior, changing the characteristics of the movement.
Migration of a single cell is by itself a very complex phenomenon, where the same cell can present different phenotypes and different types of migration, depending on its metabolic state and how it interacts with substrates, with other cells or with chemical fields. On the other hand, both individual and tissue migration modeling necessarily requires the transmission of forces between the cells and their vicinity, which in turn cannot be treated as rigid and / or uniform. Consequently, the study of both single cell migration and collective migration is necessary for a proper understanding of the movement of cells in organs and tissues.
The description of the mechanisms of migration, tissue modeling and consequent tension and traction distribution has been the focus of attention of the physics community. Although some important contributions have been made already, the physical modelling of these processes is just beginning.
In this workshop we intend to discuss some biological questions about the movement of the cells, both individual and collective, to identify where the models and techniques (e.g. numerical simulations) from Physics can help to analyze and to interpret the large number of new high quality experimental data available.
Among the questions we are interested in, we can enumerate:
- What are the mechanisms of migration of cells from isolated cells, and from groups of cells?
- How does cell density, cell mobility, cell stiffness, cell adhesion to substrate and cell-cell adhesion correlate with the structure of the deposited cell set, both at low density and at confluence?
- How does the mechanical response of tissues differ from the mechanical response of a passive system?
- How can we distinguish the role of contributions from intracellular, cellular or multicellular scales?
- What are the main ingredients and parameters?
- How to start from individual cell simulations and to extend to a group of cells and then model entire tissues?
- How does a collection of two different cell types behave? Mechanical response, spatial organization?
- How can we validate a model?
With the hope to achieve these goals, we have invited some modelers and experimentalists to participate in the workshop.
Two more satellite meetings are also
confirmed to be held
just before the conference: International Workshop
in Systems Biology, (Natal, RN), and International Workshop
on Active Matter (Porto de Galinhas, PE).
This meeting complies with the IUPAP policy on the free circulation of scientists.