Back

Using endocytosis to switch between chemoattraction and chemorepulsion

Luettgen, G. K.; Camley, B. A.

2025-10-30 cell biology
10.1101/2025.10.28.685129 bioRxiv
Show abstract

White blood cells can be guided to targets by chemoattractant signals, but this response is complicated, including guidance toward and away from inflammation sites. We model how cells can switch between being attracted and repelled by a chemical signal. We study experiments on malignant B cell lines, which find that depending on their environment, B cells can either be attracted or repelled by signals like CCL19. The presence of chemorepulsion is also dependent on whether the receptors for CCL19 can be internalized via endocytosis. We develop a stochastic model of receptor-ligand binding and internalization where bound receptors drive a nonlinear feed-forward loop of intracellular signaling molecules, which determine the cells direction. We recapitulate key experimental results: changing CCL19 concentration or inhibiting receptor internalization can switch the cells direction. Our model implies that cells can navigate toward a target concentration of a signal, regulating that target by receptor internalization. We propose experiments to test this idea.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.