This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Imagine two people standing on a stretchy sheet. When one pulls, the other feels the fabric move and responds with a pull of their own.
Each adjustment changes what the other feels. Something similar happens between living cells. They tug on the material around them, sense the stretching caused by their neighbors and adjust their own forces.
Now, a new theoretical study suggests that this back-and-forth can create an attraction that helps draw cells together. Assaf Zemel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers a physical explanation for a puzzling observation: cells grown on soft surfaces often gather into groups or networks, while those on harder surfaces can remain more dispersed. Cells live within a supporting material called the extracellular matrix—a network of fibers surrounding them that provides structure and transmits forces.
By pulling on this material, a cell changes the mechanical environment its neighbors experience. Scientists have long known that cells communicate this way. The challenge is understanding what happens when both sides keep responding.
Zemel's study develops a mathematical framework that accounts for this mutual adjustment. Rather than treating each cell's pull as fixed, the framework allows it to change in response to the stretching produced by surrounding cells. The calculations reveal an additional, short-range interaction.
For cells that strengthen their pulling forces when stretched, this interaction is attractive: their responses generate stresses in the surrounding material that tend to pull them together. In other words, the cells' ability to react to one another becomes part of what draws them closer. The mechanism is physically analogous to the universally attractive van der Waals interactions between molecules, which drive molecular cohesion and the condensation of matter.
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