Cell News—Take me out to the cellular protrusion game

Electron micrograph showing exaggerated filopodia with club-like shape induced by formin mDia2. Image by rLubov Czech, Tatyana Svitkina, and Changsong Yang, published in PLoS Biology.

Electron micrograph showing exaggerated filopodia with club-like shape induced by formin mDia2. Image by Lubov Czech, Tatyana Svitkina, and Changsong Yang, published in PLoS Biology.

Back in the day, vendors working the stands at baseball games hawked scorecards (pencil included) with the cry, “You can’t tell the players without a program.” With jumbo grandstand screens and smart phones, it would be hard not to know who’s stepping up to the plate in today’s digitally wired stadiums, but in cell biology it’s hard to keep up with changes in the lineup of the burgeoning field of cell-to-cell signaling through cellular protrusions. ASCB members Yukiko Yamashita and Mayu Inada at the Medical School of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Michael Busczak at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, update the batting order for private cell-to-cell conversations through protrusions in a new Trends in Cell Biology review.

 

The authors run through the three types of protrusion that deliver “private” cell-to-cell signals directly without the risk of misrouting to the wrong destination cell or of launching a vesicle into intercellular space—cytonemes, which are special filopodia for delivering signaling proteins, tunneling nanotubes (with the wonderful acronym of TNTs), and microtubule-based nanotubes (MTnanotubes). The idea of a thin connector or wire carrying signals directly from one cell to a very specific destination cell echoes a device once widely known in the days of paper baseball scorecards—the landline. Alas, the term “cell line” is already taken so cellular protrusion will have to do.

About the Author:


John Fleischman was the ASCB Senior Science Writer from 2000 to 2016. Best unpaid perk of the job? Working with new grad students and Nobel Prize winners.