Cell fragments reverse taxis direction relative to intact cells

In electric fields: intact keratocytes migrate to cathode, but fragments of the same cells migrate to anode—collective behavior differs from component behavior.

Source paper

extracted_from

Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates

(2024) · Patrick McMillen · Michael Levin

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Claims (1)

claim

Collective intelligence exists on a spectrum across biology from cells to organisms
supports
Authors argue no sharp distinction exists between familiar animal cognition and collective behavior in cells/tissues; same principles apply across scales and substrates.

Communities (2)

community

Collective intelligence & distributed cognition
members_of
All minds are composites of parts; individual and collective intelligence unified under substrate-neutral principles.
Collective intelligence across biological scales
members_of
Framework unifying cellular, organismal, and group cognition through shared principles of multi-agent coordination and goal alignment, developed by Levin and colleagues circa 2020s.

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

Fragments of keratocytes move opposite to whole cells in an electric field.finding0.750
From Sun et al. 2013; demonstrates that collective behavior can reverse individual behavior, illustrating top-down control.
Keratocytes migrate to the cathode, but keratocyte fragments migrate to the anode (Sun et al. 2013)finding0.730
Shows that collective behavior of an intact cell differs fundamentally from the behavior of its parts.
Cells navigate multiple problem spaces: physiological, metabolic, transcriptional, anatomicalclaim0.725
Target morphology shifts occur despite the fact that all of the individual cells have unaltered normal genomes, showing that competent subunits can be pushed to implement diverse organism-scale goals by physiological signals.claim0.724
Highlights the non-genetic control of large-scale anatomy.
The cancer phenotype can be reverted by artificially managing the bioelectric connections between a cell and its neighbors.hypothesis0.719
Predicts that restoring gap junctional coupling or appropriate Vmem can normalize oncogene-expressing cells.
Cells maintain internal representations of correct anatomical structure (target morphology) that causally constrain growth, regeneration, and repair.claim0.719
Can Cells Implement Reverse Central Dogmadetermining Which Genesquestion0.717
Planarian fragments regenerate with near 100% fidelity of anatomical structurefinding0.715
Planarians cut into pieces regenerate precisely what is missing and re-scale tissue to form complete worms.