Blow up a long balloon and two things happen: it gets longer and it gets wider. Now imagine a living cell that inflates itself under enormous pressure and yet only grows longer, never adding width.

Cells constantly shift and transform, triggering the complex choreography that shapes living organisms. Whether dividing into new cells or sculpting an embryo, these tiny movements rely on chemical ...

How do biological cells join forces to form a structure? In her Ph.D. research, Daphne Nesenberend uses mathematics to show ...

The cells that make up the walls of the finest of all lymphatic vessels have a lobate, oak leaf-like shape that makes them particularly resilient to changes in fluid volume. A similar cell shape also ...

Certain cells have an unusual shape that is similar to an oak leaf or puzzle piece, and researchers have found that the form of these cells helps them withstand dramatic changes in volume. These cells ...

Can a cell sense its own shape? Working in the Marine Biological Laboratory's Whitman Center, scientists from Dartmouth College developed an ingenious experiment to ask this question. Their conclusion ...

Dormant lung cancer cells change their shape from spindle shaped (above) to round (below), which helps protect them from the body's immune defenders. Image: Wang, Z., et al., Nature Cancer (CC BY 4.0) ...

The lymphatic system is a network of branching vessels that regulate fluid balance and support the immune system. Its smallest capillaries, comprised of a single endothelial cell layer, must stay ...

The cells that make up the walls of the finest of all lymphatic vessels have a lobate, oak leaf-like shape that makes them particularly resilient to changes in fluid volume. A similar cell shape also ...

A light-activated enzyme morphed round starfish egg cells into different shapes. This technology could one day be useful for wound healing therapies. When Fakhri first worked with in vitro cellular ...

Senescent skin cells, often referred to as zombie cells because they have outlived their usefulness without ever quite dying, have existed in the human body as a seeming paradox, causing inflammation ...