Emergence articles within Nature Communications

Featured

• Article
  15 November 2022 | Open Access

  Two simple movement mechanisms for spatial division of labour in social insects

  Ant and honeybee workers specialize on certain tasks and also on zones within the nest; but how do they avoid straying into the wrong zone? The authors conduct automated tracking experiments following thousands of individuals, revealing that workers use context-dependent rules to navigate inside the nest.

  • Thomas O. Richardson
  • , Nathalie Stroeymeyt
  •  & Laurent Keller

• Article
  13 May 2022 | Open Access

  Modulating gene regulation function by chemically controlled transcription factor clustering

  Transcription factor (TF) condensates appear to be pervasive, yet their roles remain debated. Here, the authors use a synthetic biology approach to show that TF clusters causally amplify transcription and can confer bimodality and “memory”.

  • Jiegen Wu
  • , Baoqiang Chen
  •  & Yihan Lin

• Article
  16 August 2021 | Open Access

  C. elegans colony formation as a condensation phenomenon

  Phase separation phenomena have emerged as being of critical importance in biology. Here, using colony formation in C. elegans as model, the authors demonstrate that the basic concepts that underpin phase separation at a molecular level also apply to collective phenomena at the level of a population of organisms.

  • Yuping Chen
  •  & James E. Ferrell Jr.

• Article
  09 December 2019 | Open Access

  Emergence of collective oscillations in adaptive cells

  There are many examples of cell populations exhibiting density-dependent collective oscillatory behaviour. Here, the authors show that sustained collective oscillations emerge when cells anticipate variation in signal and attempt to amplify it, a property that can be linked to adaptation.

  • Shou-Wen Wang
  •  & Lei-Han Tang