Like a symphony building from a single note, that lone cell divides again and again until thousands of cells are dancing in harmony. They push, pull, and glide across one another, weaving the intricate choreography that shapes a growing embryo into something astonishing: life in motion.
The coordination of cell behavior is at the heart of morphogenesis, the process by which cells collectively reshape and reorganize to form tissues and organs. In epithelial tissues, when cells change shape, they generate mechanical forces that ripple through their neighbors.
These forces aren’t just passive; they can be sensed by surrounding cells, potentially triggering active responses that help guide the entire tissue’s transformation. Yet, while scientists have long suspected that cells use these mechanical cues to communicate, the exact molecular mechanisms behind this “cellular conversation” have remained a mystery, especially how they orchestrate large-scale coordination across developing tissues.
Scientists from the Göttingen Campus, the Max Planck Institute, and the University of Marburg have discovered a surprising way that embryonic cells work together. They found that these cells use the same molecular tools that our ears use for hearing. The researchers believe this shared use comes from a common evolutionary origin, showing how nature can repurpose the same proteins for very different jobs.
A biosensing technique to monitor cellular communication
By combining tools from genetics, brain science, hearing research, and physics, researchers made a surprising discovery about how cells communicate. In thin layers of skin, cells can sense the movements of their neighbors and adjust their tiny movements to match. This teamwork allows groups of cells to pull together more strongly.
Because they’re so sensitive, the cells can respond quickly and flexibly; these gentle forces are the fastest signals moving through embryonic tissue.
But when researchers turned off the cells’ ability to “listen” to each other, the tissue stopped working correctly, and development slowed down or failed.
The researchers built computer models of tissue that included how cells coordinate with each other. These models showed that the gentle “whispers” between neighboring cells create a connected, dance-like movement across the whole tissue and help protect it from outside pressure. The team confirmed these effects by watching real-time videos of embryos developing and running more experiments.
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With the help of AI and advanced computer analysis, they studied about 100 times more cell pairs than ever before. This big data approach gave them the precision needed to understand these subtle cell-to-cell interactions truly.
The same tiny force sensors that help us hear faint sounds are now being linked to how embryos develop. In our ears, special hair cells detect incredibly small movements, just a few atoms wide, and turn them into nerve signals. This extreme sensitivity comes from unique proteins that convert mechanical pressure into electrical signals.
Scientists already knew these proteins were key to hearing, but now they’ve discovered they also help cells in embryos sense and respond to each other’s movements. It turns out that this is possible because every cell in the body carries the complete set of genetic instructions and can use any protein it needs, even ones known initially for completely different jobs.
Professor Fred Wolf, Director of the CIDBN and co-author of the study, said, “The phenomenon could also provide insights into how the perception of force at a cellular level has evolved. The evolutionary origin of these force-sensitive ion channel proteins probably lies in our single-celled ancestors, which we share with fungi and which emerged long before the origin of animal life.”
“But it was only with the evolution of the first animals that the current diversity of this protein type emerged.”
Future research will explore whether these tiny cellular “nanomachines” originally evolved to sense internal forces within the body, like those between neighboring cells, before being adapted for external sensing, such as detecting sound in hearing. This could reveal that their first job wasn’t to help us hear the world but to help our cells talk to each other during development.
Journal Reference
- Richa P., Häring M., Wang Q., Choudhury A. R., Göpfert M. C., Wolf F., Großhans J., Kong D. Synchronization in epithelial tissue morphogenesis. Current Biology 35, 1–14 (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.066