A team of scientists led by Assaf Zaritsky, from the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, identified a new mode of communication of recurrent communities of cells associated with the process of lymph node development in the fruit fly.
This discovery explains how collective tissue behavior arises from interactions between individual cells.
The identified communities consist of groups of three to ten cells, which not only communicate extensively with each other, but also transmit and receive information from surrounding cells.
Zaritsky explained that they identified “an intermediate spatial scale between individual cell function and tissue behavior, where communities of cells work together to coordinate the collective. “These results underscore how diversity in local communication between cells can contribute to collective decision making.”
Zaritsky's lab is supported by GIF, the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development; the Israeli Council of Higher Education through the BGU Data Science Research Center, the Israel Science Foundation and the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology, among others.