The movement of cells in the body is important for normal development, but can also be deadly — in metastatic cancer. Researchers have teased out 31 genes whose products belong to various pathways that seem to regulate human cell migration. The pathways converge on a key signalling enzyme called RSK, suggesting that this could be a target for new cancer drugs.

Daniel Haber at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and his co-workers screened roughly 11,000 genes in human cells using 55,000 small RNA molecules that silence specific genes. They used a chamber with a perforated membrane to identify which cells retained their roving abilities.

The authors found that many of the 31 genes they identified had not previously been linked to cell motility. Furthermore, when the researchers blocked RSK with a small-molecule inhibitor, single cells moved much more sluggishly.

Genes Dev. doi:10.1101/gad.1989110 (2010)