During vertebrate development, neural crest cells travel long distances as streams of cells. The molecular mechanisms that direct these ordered migrations are poorly understood but, on p. 6141, Teddy and Kulesa provide in vivo evidence that both local and long-range cell-cell interactions are involved in neural crest cell guidance in chick embryos. Here, the neural crest cells migrate just below the surface ectoderm. This allowed the researchers to closely follow their migration with confocal static and time-lapse imaging after pre-labelling them with fusion protein constructs targeted to the cell membrane and nucleus. Unexpectedly, the migrating cells were in nearly constant contact with each other through their lamellipodia and filopodia, which intertwined between local and non-local migrating cells. The researchers suggest that these hitherto unsuspected cell-cell contacts may signal positional information or enable cells with similar fates to keep in touch.

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