Studies of intercellular invasion in vitro using rabbit peritoneal neutrophil granulocytes (PMNS). I. Role of contact inhibition of locomotion.

Intercellular invasion is the active migration of cells on one type into the interiors of tissues composed of cells of dissimilar cell types. Contact paralysis of locomotion is the cessation of forward extension of the pseudopods of a cell as a result of its collision with another cell. One hypothesis to account for intercellular invasion proposes that a necessary condition for a cell type to be invasive to a given host tissue is that it lack contact paralysis of locomotion during collision with cells of that host tissue. The hypothesis has been tested using rabbit peritoneal neutrophil granulocytes (PMNs) as the invasive cell type and chick embryo fibroblasts as the host tissue. In organ culture, PMNs rapidly invade aggregates of fibroblasts. The behavior of the pseudopods of PMNs during collision with fibroblasts was analyzed for contact paralysis by a study of time-lapse films of cells in mixed monolayer culture. In monolayer culture, PMNs show little sign of paralysis of the pseudopods upon collision with fibroblasts and thus conform in their behavior to that predicted by the hypothesis.