Frequency and Fate

Stem cells have two jobs: provide a variety of cells to populate the body’s tissues and self-renew. Perhaps one of the best tissues for studying these functions is the gut lining, which is continuously replaced from a stem cell pool. Indeed, using mouse intestine (pictured) scientists have discovered a new signalling system that influences stem cell fate. It turns out it’s not simply the presence, absence or abundance of a signal that’s important, but also its oscillation frequency – the amount of times it is produced and degraded in a given timeframe. By carefully changing the oscillation frequency of stem cell factor Hes1 (cyan) – by pulsing the delivery of its induction signal – scientists could change the balance of cell types produced. This additional layer of control encoded within an existing signal helps explain a long-standing puzzle of biology: how so many cell types can be derived from relatively few molecular cues.

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 Sonja D. C. Weterings, Hiromune Eto and Jan-Daniël de Leede-Scheven, and colleagues
• Hubrecht Institute–KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, Netherlands
• Image originally published as credit the creator and use only with the related science coverage
• Research published in Science, October 2026