Back to Article Listing. Sea squirts might be the most fascinating sea creatures that most people have never heard of. These small filter feeders are hermaphrodites that begin life looking like tadpoles and then, after literally eating their own brains, evolve into colorful, squishy blobs.
And, true to their name, sea squirts have the habit of squirting water into the eyes of anyone who provokes them. They are also the perfect subjects for scientists wanting to study the mechanical forces that drive living cells. Because these same tissues line the organs, cavities and blood vessels of human bodies, the research has implications for medical challenges such as cancer and wound healing.
The team is zeroing in on the process of epithelial cell extrusion β that is, how dead and dying cells are pushed out of tissues. The goal is to develop a mechanical model of epithelial cell extrusion in sea squirts through a combination of experimental, analytical and modeling approaches. Sea squirts have large and dynamic transparent vascular networks on the outsides of their bodies as opposed to human beings and other higher-level organisms, whose vascular networks are on the insides of their bodies.
This gives researchers easy access to healthy, living epithelial cells without harming the animals. To carry out the experiment, the team adds chemicals that modify the mechanical properties of cells to the water in which the sea squirts are growing.
They then carefully observe and measure small changes in cell extrusion, allowing them to form testable theories on the mechanical forces that underlie such changes. The research is important because epithelial cells are ubiquitous throughout the human body, forming layers on the surfaces and linings of organs and cavities. The vast majority of cancers are carcinomas, which are cancers of epithelial cells.
