Filling the Gaps

Nobody likes a pothole. Unwanted holes in what should be a smooth, continuous surface can cause havoc not just on roads, but inside your body too. In early development, cells fan out to create the surface of our organs, evenly covering space without allowing large gaps to form. This type of collective cell movement is important for not just development, but wound healing and cancer growth too, so researchers need to understand how it is regulated. They identified two proteins, plexin A and semaphorin, known to help nerve cells find their way during development. Watching a fruit fly’s testis development in the lab (pictured, cells reaching green tendrils out as they grow) they saw that plexin A helps cells maintain balance, not too independent but not too rigidly stuck together, while semaphorin fine-tunes plexin A’s activity. If either protein is disrupted, gaps appear, highlighting their importance in keeping things together.

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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• Image from work by Maik C. Bischoff, Jenevieve E. Norton and Mark Peifer
• Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Published in bioRxiv, October 2024 (not peer reviewed)