Individual cells make important decisions all the time, and now it turns out that they do so much more
According to the team, cells use multimodal sensing to take into account external signals and information from within the cell, such as the number of cell organelles.
In certain situations, internal signals can override external stimuli: for example, in tumors, where cells are resistant to various treatments
This kind of drug resistance is a major problem in the fight against cancer. It can be solved by taking into account the contextual signals experienced by individual cells. And then change them.
To test whether cells make decisions inIn keeping with the contextual, multimodal sensing that humans do, the researchers had to simultaneously measure the activity of multiple signaling nodes—these are the cell's external sensors—as well as several potential signals from within the cell, such as the local environment and the number of cellular organelles.
All this was analyzed both in separate cells,and in millions of cells. To do this, the authors used a method that allows you to visualize and determine the number of proteins, which can be up to 80.
The researchers found that when thethe activity of individual sensors, then the internal signals also changed. For example, a large number of mitochondria affects how an individual cell perceives external stimuli.
When researchers assessed a single cell's decision to, say, reproduce or stay still, the decision was highly dependent on its internal state.
Thus, individual cells are able to make adequate context-dependent decisions. They turned out to be smarter than previously thought, the authors concluded.
Read more:
Archaeologists have found drawings of creepy people with huge heads: who they were
NASA: James Webb telescope irreversibly damaged by small meteorite impact
Largest and hottest hydrothermal vent field found in Pacific Ocean