News
Shaping cells with light
24 Mar 2025
Researchers use light stimuli to shape cells and develop a model that explains the mechanisms – with implications for synthetic biology.
A main characteristic of all living organisms is that cells can dynamically alter their shape – otherwise, fundamental processes like cell division would not work. An international team led by LMU physicist Erwin Frey, Chair Professor of Statistical and Biological Physics and member of the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster, and Professor Nikta Fakhri from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), employing a combination of experimental and theoretical methods, has elucidated for the first time the mechanisms by which cells dynamically change their shape in response to environmental influences – and managed to control this process from the outside.