Introduction to Cell Migration Gateway
The Cell Migration Gateway is a comprehensive and free online resource. Originally created as the result of a collaboration between the Cell Migration Consortium (CMC) and Nature Publishing Group, as of August 1st, 2011, it is supported solely by the CMC. It is aimed at helping you keep abreast of developments in the field of migration research. Central to the collaboration are the Cell Migration Updates, CMC Activity Center and CM Knowledgebase, designed to highlight new and important contributions to the field from outside and within the Consortium and to merge this information into a comprehensive Cell Migration database (CM Knowledgebase). The site is intended to highlight latest developments in the field of cell migration, while placing the activities and contributions of the CMC in the context of the field as a whole.
Cell Migration Updates are intended to provide a one-stop overview of the latest research in cell migration for specialists and non-specialists alike. The CMC Gateway is updated monthly to bring you the latest news and selected research highlights. In addition, it will provide featured articles on the most relevant advances in the field. By collating the new literature from journals across the board into a key worded research library, we hope to provide a continuously updated broad overview of the field.
The Gateway also presents the activities of the Consortium though the CMC Activity Center. This section of the site describes the various projects being carried out within the Consortium, the approaches taken to achieve their objectives and provides lists of resources (both Consortium and non-Consortium generated) available to migration researchers. Included in this section is a large and growing public repository of primary data, primarily from the activities of the Protein Discovery and Modeling Initiatives, which it is hoped others will utilize to further their own research efforts. The Collaboration & Release Policy pages in this section also explain how to interact with the Consortium and how data and information is made available through the various initiatives within the Consortium.
As of October 2015, the Cell Migration Gateway is operated by the Systems microscopy and MultiMot consortia.
Cell Migration Consortium
The Cell Migration Consortium, which operated between the years 2001-2013, consisted of investigators and collaborators from more than 20 institutions. All members were dedicated to accelerating progress in migration-related research by fostering collaborative, interdisciplinary research activities. The goal was to develop novel reagents, technologies, data and information and demonstrate their utility in migration research. The Consortium arose from a realization of the existence of significant barriers to research which cannot be adequately overcome by individual investigators, but rather require a multi-investigator, interdisciplinary collaborative approach. By facilitating and catalyzing interdisciplinary research on migration, the Consortium has developed information and reagents useful to all investigators in migration-related areas. The Consortium sponsors focused workshops on specific areas of Consortium interest that are open to all investigators interested in cell migration. The Consortium also places its data, reagents, protocols and other activities in the public domain in a timely and responsible manner through its website.
The Consortium served to promote interactions among investigators in common fields as well as those working in different sub-disciplines, e.g., adhesion, cytoskeleton, signaling, and vesicle trafficking. It also promotes the entry of investigators from other disciplines, e.g., modeling, imaging, biomaterials, chemistry, and proteomics, into the field of migration research through collaborative research projects, meetings and web-based interactive activities.
The main aim of the Consortium's activities was to accelerate progress in basic, applied and disease-related research. The ultimate goal of the Consortium is to integrate all that is known about key migration-related proteins (all significant published qualitative and quantitative information) into a relational database, the Cell Migration Knowledgebase. The emphasis of this database is on human genes but, with the increasing efforts through genetic manipulations, information on Drosophila, C. elegans and mouse is being increasingly incorporated. This database will also allow entirely new insights to be gleaned through intelligent data mining: the Knowledgebase database was developed with the specific aim of allowing interactions, and indeed whole pathways, to be modelled.
- Framework
- Participants
- Management & Organization
- Workshops
Systems Microscopy
The Systems Microscopy Network of Excellence is a life science project spearheading a key enabling methodology based on live cell imaging for the development of next-generation systems biology. The project is funded under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Union.
The multidisciplinary consortium joins 17 research groups spread over the whole of Europe and is coordinated from Karolinska Institutet. The project was launched 1 January 2011 and will run until the end of 2015. During the course of the project, the network will further tools and strategies to make available to the wider research community, a new approach to the systems biology of the living cell.
Multimot
MULTIMOT is a H2020 EU funded project that aims to build an open data ecosystem for cell migration research, through standardization, dissemination and meta-analysis efforts.
As cell migration studies have thus de facto become both a high-content as well as a high-throughput science, an urgent yet largely unmet bioinformatics need has emerged in the form of intra- and inter-lab data management solutions, standardization and dissemination infrastructure, and novel approaches and algorithms for meta-analysis.
The central goal of MULTIMOT is therefore to construct a comprehensive, open and free data exchange ecosystem for cell migration data, based on the development of extensible community standards and a robust, future-proof repository that collects, annotates and disseminates these data in the standardized formats. The standards and repository will be supported by freely available and open source tools for data management, submission, extraction and analysis. Importantly, we will also demonstrate the application of large-scale integrative data analysis from cell migration studies through two proof-of-concept studies: guiding personalized cancer treatment from patient organoids, and providing patient-specific diagnosis based on peripheral blood leukocyte motility.
Contact Details
If you have any editorial queries regarding the Cell Migration Gateway, or have suggestions for content, or conferences that you would like to be included in the Conference Calendar, please contact the editor on e-mail at:
If you are interested in contacting the Cell Migration Consortium, please write to:
Cell Migration Gateway Team
c/o Prof. Benny Geiger
Department of Molecular Cell Biology
Weizmann Institute of Science
234 Herzl St.
PO Box 26Rehovot 7610001
Israel
If you are having problems with the website, or with your email registration, or if you have any technical queries about the Cell Migration Gateway, please e-mail: