Amin Doostmohammadi publishes in Nature Communications

An interdisciplinary study led jointly by Amin Doostmohammadi, Novo Nordisk Assistant Professor at NBIA, has shed a new light on the mechanics of cellular integration. The results of Amin Doostmohammmadi and collaborators' work have just been published in Nature communications and are highlighted on NBI’s webpage.

The addition of new cells into a tissue is a key process in sculpting organs during normal development, but it is also subverted during the metastatic spread of cancer cells. While much is known about the molecular signals that control this process, whether mechanical information plays a role in this process is unknown. This new study reveals how migrating cells join a tissue by reading mechanical information from the neighboring tissue and by creating the right environment for their integration. This multi-disciplinary work, which combines developmental biology and theoretical physics, is the product of an international team of scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute, the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine, and the Max Planck Center for Physics of Living Systems. Their findings highlight the importance of mechanical information in directing cell movement during embryonic development and disease.