Moving Together

When hundreds of illuminated drones light up the night sky with extravagant displays, each individual machine follows unique directions to assemble the larger picture. Researchers have developed a control system to similarly instruct individual cell movements within a larger tissue. Microscopic light beams (blue) shine on one edge of each of the individual dog kidney cells pictured rotating over the course of 24 hours. These targeted light gradients stimulate a growth factor receptor on each cell (the 2026 Nobel Prize-winning discipline called optogenetics), driving the overall directional movement. The system automatically identifies and measures individual cells, allowing researchers to control and investigate movement at both cell and tissue scales. They then asked how waves of signals influence the way groups of cells move, and found that how quickly a signal travels through a tissue can determine the way the tissue moves, illustrating the potential of the tool to perform complex experiments in fundamental biology without extensive manual management.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video from work by Harrison R. Oatman and colleagues
• Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Cell Systems, September 2026