3 May 2023

 

Emergence of division of labor in tissues through cell interactions and spatial cues.
This week, I’m going out of my comfort zone since a few folks here are less interested in microbial pathogens and more interested in complex communities. This paper here takes interesting approaches from economic theory to show how there are two distinct mechanisms by which cells can achieve specialization and division of labor, resulting in different spatial distributions. This is cool to think about in the context of biofilms, tumors, and the origin of multicellularity.

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(23)00423-0

 

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