American Biotechnologist

Cells communicate in many ways. The can communicate through direct contact (juxtacrine signaling), over short distances (paracrine signaling), or over large distances (endocrine signaling). Until now, endocrine signaling research has focused primarily on hormones which can transverse relatively large distances in order to convey their message to target cells. Now, scientists at UCLA have discovered a previously unknown method of long distance cell-to-cell communication that does not involve the use of hormones.

In a study published in the American Journal of Translational Research, Dr. Keith Norris, senior author of the research and assistant dean for clinical and translational science at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and his team found that cells located on the inside of a hormonally impervious membrane were able to receive messages regulating their calcium signaling pathways from cells located outside the membrane.

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Researchers have developed a new way to observe and track large numbers of rapidly moving objects under a microscope, capturing precise motion paths in three dimensions.

Over the course of the study–reported online Sept. 17, 2012, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences–researchers followed an unprecedented 24,000 rapidly moving cells over wide fields of view and through large sample volumes, recording each cell’s path for as long as 20 seconds.

“We can very precisely track the motion of small things, more than a thousand of them at the same time, in parallel,” says research lead and National Science Foundation CAREER awardee Aydogan Ozcan. an electrical engineering and bioengineering professor at UCLA. “We were able to achieve sub-micron accuracy over a large volume, allowing us to understand, statistically, how thousands of objects move in different ways.”

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