External Force

In times of old, important people were carried high on litters. Teams of people stood beneath and worked together to heave a structure up. This collective application of force is also what happens, at a somewhat smaller scale, during hair follicle formation. Researchers have been examining the mechanical forces at play as cells move and develop when they form first a placode (a thickening in the skin’s epithelium), and then a follicle. They found that placode development is driven by forces in the surrounding tissue (pictured, with a marker of contractile proteins (top), and cell nuclei and structural keratin (blue and pink, bottom) in mouse skin tissue). The forces were strongest around, rather than within, the placode. How mechanical forces are applied, and the impact they have, is essential to healthy tissue and organ growth, so understanding this interplay could inform future treatments for disorders where tissue structure is disrupted, such as cancer, or for regenerative medicine.

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 Clémentine Villeneuve and colleagues
• Stem Cells and Metabolism Research Program, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Cell Biology, February 2024