Although we already know a lot of information about the cells of our body, this continues to surprise us. In this case, a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the University of Seville found the key to packaging the epithelial cells that make up the body's tissues. The form that they adopt and which allows the tissue to bend was called "escutoid" and, although it is very complex, it is stable .

Researchers from the Department of Cell Biology of the University of Seville and the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville (IBiS) discovered that epithelial cells take on a geometric form that had no never been described before and which was previously represented as a prism or truncated pyramids. But no, the form is totally new, as published this Friday in the journal Nature Communications .

" The cells remain the same ", says the head of the investigation, Luis Escudero. "Until now, the cells were considered as columns, which could more or less shape their shape, but to a certain extent." "With this article, we have shown that can adopt new forms that have not been described so we baptized them as escuyos," Escudero explains.

But why this form and not another? This also seems to have an explanation: " Energetically this form is more favorable for tissue it is more stable when cells adopt this form," Escudero explains. "This is very important because it facilitates the adoption of very different forms, which is necessary for the organs to be well established and function properly," he explains: "If you understand how a tissue is formed, you can create a model or a model, being a healthy epithelial tissue, from there, geometry and structure can have algorithms that detect pathologies ", explains Clara Grima, a collaborating mathematician in the study that was carried out through the participation of three disciplines: biology, physics and mathematics. "For example, if something has gone wrong and the geometry or structure is changed from the model, then Is that there may be tumor growth "he adds.This new geometric form the escutoid," is like a twisted prism , which can have different faces of those given in a prism, "he says. But is by no means a prism although it looks like a form that had never been described before.

From zygote to epithelium

The idea of this search was to find an answer to " how to pbad from one organism to another one cell to the other there are many small steps and c & rsquo; That's what we try to understand, "says Escudero. The researcher details a bit more: "What happens during development is that a single cell, the zygote, divides and starts to adopt different destinations to give all the cells of an adult individual, but at the same time the cells must organize and establish a series of rules so that everything happens at the right moment and with the indicated form. It pbades from a very simple tissue (the zygote) to an epithelium (the bricks that would form the body) and they must change their shape and position between them to form organs, "he explains to Hypertext of the other side of the phone.

the tissues are bent to shape the organs this happens through a change of shape of the cells, if this change of shape does not occur, everything would be more complicated and would not be energetically favorable, "says Escu dero. And, of course, the form they take is escutoid .

What now?

The investigators of the Escudero team already have the mission . Although they will not overlook tissue observations with animal models such as fruit fly and zebrafish, which are the ones that were used in this study and thanks to which they saw escutoid occurs "so much in invertebrates as in vertebrates"; the next step is now to address tissue engineering

"A lot of progress is being made in the field of tissue engineering, but we think that it do not look closely at how tissues are organized when you make tissue in vitro ", explains the researcher. "We think our discovery is important for these groups, when they make tissue engineering, to see that cells in vitro are organized equally within the body." "We ourselves want to enter this field now and contribute our knowledge to this area ", explains Escudero