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ONLY CONNECT mutant genes and networking cells

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These days, everyone is talking about networking, but living cells have been networking for many millions of years. This is not surprising because communication is vital to the fate of every cell in an animal or other living organism. Whether it is to divide, to turn into a skin cell, liver cell or nerve cell, or to do the decent thing and die to make way for others, depends on a cell's developmental history and its capacity to respond to a whole battery of external signals. Therefore a good understanding of the way in which this network of cell communication works would put us in a powerful position to deal with the problems of growth, development, cancer and ageing.

Robert Whittle and Roger Phillips in BIOLS have recently been awarded funding by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council to use the tools of genetics to dissect the mechanisms of cell-to-cell signalling during development. Like all good geneticists, they are reaching for their fruit flies and their method will be to stimulate mutations in genes and attempt to make sense of the resultant disasters. Errors in genes that specify the components of cell 'networking' are likely to have drastic and widespread effects. So they will look at the effect of mutations induced in small patches of cells. If the result is a localised upset this will suggest that those cells had lost only a 'housekeeping' or 'response' function; a disturbance reaching beyond the cells carrying the mutation, however, would point to a failure of those cells to give their neighbours the correct signals. By analogy, a failure at Gatwick in flight control would have more widespread consequences than one in the duty-free department.

There seem to be only a limited number of pathways that 'transduce' signals which arrive at the surface membrane of a cell. Despite this, one cell can cope with several simultaneous conversations with its neighbours and the same signalling molecule can elicit quite different responses in closely adjacent cells. Our future ability to manipulate these processes in medical, industrial and agricultural applications will depend upon identification and understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms. "We ourselves are part of a network of geneticists", says Robert, "and will share new genes and information world-wide with four other specialist laboratories. Once we know more about the cellular machinery and the underlying molecular mechanisms in flies, we will be well on the way to understanding similar systems in our own cells and those of our near animal relatives."

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Friday May 30th 1997