Gutsy Move

Like harmless tags used to follow animals in the wild, fluorescent proteins are often used to trace how living cells move about – during the earliest stages of life this is still a little mysterious. Here thousands of stem cells flood into the centre of a chick embryo, turning from a flat sheet of cells, the endoderm, into a cylindrical ‘gut tube’ – its early gastrointestinal tract. Live cell imaging traces artificial fluorescent proteins in each cell – a change from purple to white highlights their 16-hour journey. Patterns of movement bring waves of cells crashing inwards, a feat of shape-shifting – or morphogenesis – guided by a chemical called FGF. In humans, faults in FGF may lead to developmental problems and early miscarriage. Understanding how chemical signals are converted into mechanical forces may be important to helping early pregnancy along and, in adult tissues, open new avenues for regenerative medicine.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image by Nandan Nerurkar, Columbia Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
• Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature, January 2019