Heading for Trouble

Navigating your way through a dense crowd of people requires both physical strength and a bit of guile. Immune cells patrolling the tightly-packed cells of the skin face a similar challenge. Researchers examined how they do it, studying the role of microtubules – part of the cell skeleton that acts as both scaffold and internal transport network. They compared the behaviour of Langerhans cells, immune cells in the skin, under normal conditions to when their microtubule network was disrupted. They found that microtubules are crucial for navigation, rather than movement alone (pictured, blue Langerhans cells migrating towards a wound under normal conditions, 0–10s, and moving more aimlessly after microtubules are destabilised by a drug, 10–20s). The microtubule network acts as a steering and support system, helping immune cells keep their shape, clear debris, and find their way towards trouble.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video from work by Eric Peterman and colleagues
• Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Journal of Cell Science, September 2025