Larger and faster organoid growth achieved using cell squeezing

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Children’s Hospital (both MA, USA) have revealed that physically squeezing cells (also referred to as cell squeezing), in addition to crowding their contents, can trigger them to grow and divide faster than they normally would. The team explained that while it sounds like cell squeezing could be counterintuitive, squeezing acts to wring water out of a cell. With less water, proteins and other cell components are packed closer together and this can trigger cell signaling and activate genes within a cell due to the close proximity. Within their study, which has been...