The Cell Migration Gateway is a comprehensive and free online resource that is the result of a collaboration between the Cell Migration Consortium (CMC) and Nature Publishing Group, aimed at helping you keep abreast of developments in the field of migration research. Central to the collaboration are the Cell Migration Updates, CMC Activity Center and CM Knowledgebase, designed to highlight new and important contributions to the field from outside and within the Consortium and to merge this information into a comprehensive Cell Migration database (CM Knowledgebase). The site is intended to highlight latest developments in the field of cell migration, while placing the activities and contributions of the CMC in the context of the field as a whole.

Cell Migration Updates are intended to provide a one-stop overview of the latest research in cell migration for specialists and non-specialists alike. It is updated monthly to bring you the latest news and selected highlights from Nature Journals. In addition, it will provide two featured articles a month on the most relevant advances in the field, including those published in non-NPG journals. By collating the new literature from journals across the board into a key worded research library, we hope to provide a continuously updated broad overview of the field. You can register here to receive an email table of contents for the Cell Migration Update, or an RSS feed.

The Gateway also presents the activities of the Consortium though the CMC Activity Center. This section of the site describes the various projects being carried out within the Consortium, the approaches taken to achieve their objectives and provides lists of resources (both Consortium and non-Consortium generated) available to migration researchers. Included in this section is a large and growing public repository of primary data, primarily from the activities of the Protein Discovery and Modeling Initiatives, which it is hoped others will utilize to further their own research efforts. The Collaboration & Release Policy pages in this section also explain how to interact with the Consortium and how data and information is made available through the various initiatives within the Consortium.

The ultimate goal of the Consortium is to integrate all that is known about key migration-related proteins (all significant published qualitative and quantitative information) into a relational database, the Cell Migration Knowledgebase. The emphasis of this database is on human genes but, with the increasing efforts through genetic manipulations, information on Drosophila, C. elegans and mouse is being increasingly incorporated. This database will also allow entirely new insights to be gleaned through intelligent data mining: the Knowledgebase database was developed with the specific aim of allowing interactions, and indeed whole pathways, to be modelled.

This CMC resource is made by the cell migration community for the cell migration research community. We actively encourage your contributions and feedback to ensure the success of this project. Please write to us at cellmigration@nature.com.

The Cell Migration Consortium currently comprises investigators and collaborators from more than 20 institutions. All members are dedicated to accelerating progress in migration-related research by fostering collaborative, interdisciplinary research activities. The goal is to develop novel reagents, technologies, data and information and demonstrate their utility in migration research. The Consortium arose from a realization of the existence of significant barriers to research which cannot be adequately overcome by individual investigators, but rather require a multi-investigator, interdisciplinary collaborative approach. By facilitating and catalyzing interdisciplinary research on migration, the Consortium has developed information and reagents useful to all investigators in migration-related areas. The Consortium sponsors focused workshops on specific areas of Consortium interest that are open to all investigators interested in cell migration. The Consortium also places its data, reagents, protocols and other activities in the public domain in a timely and responsible manner through its website.

The Consortium serves to promote interactions among investigators in common fields as well as those working in different sub-disciplines, e.g., adhesion, cytoskeleton, signaling, and vesicle trafficking. It also promotes the entry of investigators from other disciplines, e.g., modeling, imaging, biomaterials, chemistry, and proteomics, into the field of migration research through collaborative research projects, meetings and web-based interactive activities. The main aim of the Consortium's activities is to accelerate progress in basic, applied and disease-related research.

• Framework
• Participants
• Management & Organization
• Workshops