Remember where you're going? How scent helps

Marshaling a diverse team of collaborators from University College London, Harvard University, and Florida State University, researchers Harrison V. Prentice-Mott and ASCB member Jagesh V. Shah in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School report in a new PNAS paper that they have identified key elements of the basic mechanism in "directional memory."

By precisely controlling attractant concentrations flowing to chemotactic neutrophil-like cells in a 1D microfluidic channel, the researchers can now say that moesin, an ERM-family protein, working with other polarized cytoskeletal structures including actomyosin and microtubules themselves are the molecular basis for longer-lived directional memory. This mechanism, say Prentice-Mott et al., allows neutrophils and other chemotactic cells to keep their bearings in low signal or even uniform environments while still being able to respond to short-term cycles.