This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Every time a tissue grows or renews itself, cells must divide inside an already crowded environment. That creates a fundamental problem that scientists have not fully understood: How does a tightly packed sheet of cells make room for two daughter cells when there was once only one?
A new study from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research reveals part of the answer may have been right in front of us all along. The study, published online in Current Biology, focused on epithelial tissues, the tightly organized sheets of cells that form body surfaces and line organs. The intestinal lining is one of the body's most rapidly renewing tissues, making it an ideal place to study how repeated cell division reshapes tissue architecture.
"Epithelial tissues are doing something remarkable all the time," said Stowers investigator and graduate school president Matt Gibson, Ph.D. "They're growing, adding or replacing cells, but still maintaining proper tissue architecture. What's exciting here is that dynamic shape changes built into cell division appear to be part of how tissues accommodate that growth." Gibson's team, led by former Stowers postdoctoral researcher Subu Ramanathan, Ph.D., combined live imaging of mouse intestinal organoids, miniature lab-grown models of gut tissue, with a computational model.
In most tissues, the basal surface is hidden against neighboring cells or supporting material. In intestinal organoids, that surface faces outward, giving the researchers an unusually clear view of cell behavior that is normally difficult to observe. "At the time, the lab had never worked with mice, let alone organoids," Ramanathan said.
"Matt gave me the freedom to build something outside the lab's usual wheelhouse. That generosity is a big part of why this worked." Across 33 filmed cell divisions, the team observed the same overall sequence of cell rearrangements predicted by the model. Together, the approaches showed that the dramatic shape changes cells undergo during mitosis, the process by which one cell divides into two, actively reorganize neighboring cells.
This revealed a fundamental mechanism that helps growing tissues maintain their structure. "When I first imaged the basal surface in organoids, what I saw was striking: rosettes forming and neighboring cells swapping places," said Ramanathan, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. "But the real insight came when we realized the story wasn't that simple." In humans, up to 90% of cancer diagnoses are carcinomas, cancers that begin in epithelial cell layers.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
