Analysis of Collective Migration Patterns Within Tumors

Abstract

Metastasis is a hallmark of cancer and the leading cause of mortality among cancer patients. Cancer, in its most deadly form, is thus not only a disease of uncontrolled cell growth but also a disease of uncontrolled cell migration. The study of tumor cell migration requires both experimental systems that are representative of the complex tumor environment as well as quantitative tools to analyze migration patterns. In this chapter, we focus on experimental and analytical methods to capture and analyze cell migration in live explants from mouse intestinal tumors. We first describe a protocol to extract and perform ex vivo live imaging on intestinal tumors in mice. We then provide a step-by-step image analysis workflow using freely available software and custom analysis scripts for extracting several parameters related to collective cell migration and cell and tissue organization.