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Material witness

Materials with agency

Nature Materials volume 22, page 272 (2023)Cite this article

During embryogenesis — the natural prototype for synthetic morphology — cells adopt particular arrangements through a dialogue of intercellular communication accompanied by shape changes, migration, and changes of internal state as they differentiate towards tissue-specific cell types. The rules of these processes are still not well understood. Cells can, for example, communicate through mechanical interactions (such as deformations of the membrane, which can activate stress-sensitive membrane proteins and channels), chemical signals (such as hormones) and electrical signals (for example via gap junctions)7. Such signals arriving at the boundaries of the ‘agents’ can be transmitted via various cell-signalling pathways to induce some change in the state of activation of the genome — switching on expression of a gene, say — that can then, in turn, feed back on the cell’s state and behaviour.

In this way, information flows between the various scales to direct the growth, deformation and folding of tissues into complex shapes8. The resulting differentiation of cells from a stem-cell state in the early embryo to a mature somatic state can be followed at single-cell resolution using single-cell RNA sequencing to look at time series of instantaneous transcriptional profiles9, but what determines the transcriptional states of cells is still not clear. It seems likely that, out of the immense galaxy of conceivable states, just a few represent stable dynamical attractors of the system10.

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    Philip Ball

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Ball, P. Materials with agency. Nat. Mater. 22, 272 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01501-8

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