Stress Lines

Walking in a straight line with your eyes closed is surprisingly tricky. So how do cells navigating dark depths of the body keep on track? These essential journeys, fundamental to healthy development, are enabled by stress fibres – bundles of proteins that anchor and guide a cell’s movement. How these stress fibres manoeuvre is poorly understood. A new study observed cell movement in a fruit fly egg chamber and discovered the fibres steer progress through a conveyor-belt mechanism, growing new material at their leading tip and laying down fresh sticky segments one in front of the other (video, with growing tips in blue). Adhesion at the back is dismantled as the rear of the cell catches up. The researchers identified a key regulator, a protein called DAAM, that supports this on-the-move growth, and showed this constant treadmill keeps each cell on a steady trajectory, and on course for a healthy life.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video by Kristin M Sherrard, Maureen Cetera and Sally Horne-Badovinac
• Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, November 2021