Extracellular ATP disrupts cell-to-cell coordination in basal xenobots, preprint reports

What happened

Basal xenobots are organoid-like constructs made from embryo cells. The authors recorded calcium signals in them before and after adding extracellular adenosine triphosphate (ATP), then used multivariate information theory to compare how information moved between cells in the two states.

ATP caused what they describe as a dramatic reconfiguration: multicellular coordination fell across the construct, information transfer and integration were reduced, and the global entropy rate decreased.

Why it matters

A central question in synthetic morphology is what holds a group of cells together as a coordinated whole. This result points to purinergic signalling as one regulator, and the authors suggest that the degree of self-organisation in a living construct might be tuned with drugs.

Caveats

This is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This entry is based on its abstract, which reports no sample sizes or effect sizes. The measurements are of calcium activity, not membrane voltage, and the conclusions rest on statistical measures of information flow, not on changes in the xenobots' behaviour or form.