Cell crawling is a form of locomotion where a cell moves across a surface by repeatedly extending its front, anchoring it and then pulling its body forward. The movement is driven by the dynamic remodeling of the cell’s internal cytoskeleton, primarily involving the protein actin. In this structured illumination micrograph, a crawling cell is shown with DNA in blue and actin filaments in pink.
Image courtesy of Dylan T. Burnette, Vanderbilt University.