Our cells can divide in a completely indefinite manner

Researchers have discovered a kind of division that allows cells to use the information that is encoded in their form to direct how kind of cells their offspring becomes. This can help us develop engineering tissue and elaborate on our understanding of how cancers spread.

Until now, scientists thought that most cells in the body were round to prepare to divide into two. This makes it easier for them to distribute their content right between their “daughter” cells, resulting in two cells of the same type.

An exception to this is stem cells that undergo an unger or asymmetrical cell division that produce cells of two different types.

But Shane Herbert at the University of Manchester, UK, and his colleagues noted that non-voice cells in the developing blood vessels of zebrafiskembryos also dive asymmetrically. These cells, known as endothelial cells, migrated to form new blood vessel branches and divided without rounding to create two different types.

When the team manipulative the shape of humane endothelial cells in a lab bowl, it confirmed that their form before the division predicted Howmetric that the division would be. Longer, thinner cells were the most likely to share asymmetrically, suggesting that cells can fine the nature of their divisions depending on the form they take between them.

This means that cells do not lose information about their structure and behavior that they wanted them to go through rouning, says Herbert. “Very often they actually retain their shape, and that means they can transfer that kind of memory.”

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

The discovery may have applications for growing replacement tissue in the laboratory, where the ability to grow blood vessels is a key limitation. “Our work shows is that there is a really specific environment needed to give these cells the kind of form and behavior that has to generate functional blood vessels,” says team member Holly Lovegrove, also at the University of Manchester. Manipulation of cell forms could be offered a new way of generating certain cell types, she says. Cancer, meanwhile, spreads by generating clusters of migratory cells so that the new findings could provide further insights into how they do this.

It is a nice example of how organizations can fine -tune mechanisms like Cellesund to do different things, such as the multitasking needed to sculpt tissue, says Buzz Baum of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. “It’s a smart way to keep the information you need while still growing the network by making more cells.”