The finding:
Like others in their field, Bénédicte Sanson and colleagues from University of Cambridge had been trying to explain how different embryonic cell types stay separate during development. The predominant hypothesis suggested that different adhesion molecules helped sort one cell type from another. “We’d been doing screens and screens [for these molecules] and found none,” says Sanson. But when a movie for an unrelated experiment tracking myosin in a fly embryo ran long, Sanson’s team noticed the GFP-labeled myosin built up at the boundaries between developing cells, suggesting that it was these cords of myosin that kept cells from mixing. “This is essential because these compartments will eventually produce different parts of the body,” says Faculty Member Valera Vasioukhin in her review.
The steps: Sanson and ...
