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Like an army of ants swarming over a freshly-vacated picnic blanket, embryonic myeloid cells, the very first immune cells to emerge during development, rapidly spread throughout the embryo to establish a first line of defence. Later in life myeloid cells can actively migrate towards wounds or infections in response to chemical signals, but how this initial spread is coordinated, before mature tissues are established, was unclear. A new study has shown that the physical movement of developing tissues helps steer these early immune cells (pictured, a sheet of frog embryonic tissue, blue, spreading outwards and guiding red immune cells as they disperse). Not simply caught up in the flow, the immune cells reorganise their internal skeleton and form protrusions towards the direction of tissue flow, actively moving with the current. Understanding how tissue movement can guide immune cells could reveal mechanisms linked to migration in wound healing, inflammation, and cancer.

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 from work by Hoang Anh Le and colleagues
• Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, University College London, London, UK
• Video contributed by the author and published here with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Nature Cell Biology, September 2026