Eating the Dead

Macrophages, monocytes and neutrophils may be the professionals when it comes to gobbling up pathogens and dead cells, but other non-professional phagocytes can do a good job of clearing up too. The epithelial cells pictured in this zebrafish embryo, for example, have been busy engulfing dead cells and debris (red) as part of normal development. So how do these non-professionals do it? In the zebrafish at least, research reveals that a protein complex that glues cells together – called the E-cadherin complex – doubles as the machinery for devouring cellular debris. E-cadherin is expressed on the surface of all epithelial cells and is highly conserved in mammals, suggesting the same glue-phagocytic dual functionality is at play in humans too. If so, finding ways to boost the protein’s phagocytic role could help to promote debris clearance, which is an underlying cause of inflammation in many diseases.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Hanna-Maria Häkkinen, Marta Batet and Laura F. Bianchi, and colleagues
• Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Barcelona, Spain
• Image originally published with no restrictions – hence published here with as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, August 2026