Biofilms in liminal space

“We think that this is likely a very common occurrence in nature, where, many times, when you have simple cellular collectives, just through the very fact that they are interacting, it will lead to emergent physical traits,” Peter Yunker said. “These will very often have biological consequences.”

Yunker’s work with the contact angle is a key example of how local factors can have macro consequences for life, said Ming Guo, who studies the geometry of developing embryos. 

The results have implications for his own lab, he said, and for our understanding of how a group of individual cells becomes one multicellular individual.

“This is going to be really interesting for us to further dive down and understand the rules that regulate how cells talk to their neighbors,” he said. 

He hopes researchers can build on the work to show how these local communications lead to the emergence of a global shape. 

With enough information, Guo said that he might one day be able to predict an organism’s final form based on these cell-to-cell interactions.

“That’s the dream,” he said. “We hope to have a big, unified model.”