Our cells can divide in a completely unexpected way

Scientists have discovered a division child that allows cells to use the information encoded in their form to immediately become their descendants. This could help us develop engineering forms and deepen our understanding of how cancers spread.

Until now, scientists thought that most body cells become round while preparing to divide into two. This makes it easier for them to distribute their contents equally among their “daughter” cells, resulting in two cells of the same type.

An exception to this are voice cells, which under an unequal or asymmetric cell division, which produces cells or two different types.

But Shane Herbert at Manchester University, the United Kingdom, and his colleagues noticed that Stem cells in the blood vessels in the development of zebra fish embryos were also asymmetrically divided. These cells, known as endothelial cells, were migrating to form new branches of blood vessels and divided without rounding to create two different types.

When the team manipulated the shape of human endothelial cells in a laboratory dish, he confirmed that their shape before the division predicted how symmetrical that division would be. The longer and more thin cells were the most likely to divide asymmetrically, which suggests that cells can adjust the nature of their divisions depending on the way they take the subject.

It means that cells do not lose information about their structure and behavior as they would do if they were rounded, says Herbert. “Very frequently, they realize their form, and that means that they can transfer that child of memory.”

This also means that cells do not have to stop what they do to divide, but they can migrate, divide and generate different types of cells at the same time. This allows them to quickly respond to dynamic development demands, such as the need to supply an expanding tissue with blood vessels or nerves.

The discovery could have applications for the growth of replacement tissues in the laboratory, where the ability to grow blood vessels is a key limitation. “Our work shows that this is a really specific environment that is needed to give the cells the son of the shape and behavior they need to generate functional blood vessels,” says the member of the Lovegrove team, also at the University of Manchester. Manipulating cellular forms could sacrifice a new way of generating certain types of cells, she says. Meanwhile, cancer propagates generating migratory cell groups, so the new findings could provide more information, Intight Intight do this.

It is a good example of how organisms can adjust mechanisms such as cell rounding to do different things, such as the multitasking necessary to sculpt from developmental tissues, says Buzz Baum or the MRC laboratory or molecular biology in Cambridge, the United Kingdom. “It is an intelligent way to maintain the information you need while the network grows by making more cells.”