People can be brittle, transparent, shattered, or have a heart of glass. Now these attributes seem all the more appropriate following a discovery by researchers that migrating cells in our bodies behave in a remarkably similar way to glass when it is heated and cooled.

In a study published in PNAS, researcher Xavier Trepat from Barcelona’s Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia – based at the Barcelona Science Park– and his collaborators have been looking at collective cell migration, which occurs in our tissue for good or bad: during embryonic development or wound healing, for example, but on the other hand in cancer invasion. So far, much of the research into how this migration takes place has been done on individual cells. By looking at a collection of migrating cells – in this case, in cells from the surface of the kidney – the scientists discovered that their movement as a group – migration slowing as cell density rises, and the fastest cells moving in large groups whose scale grows with increasing cell density – is similar to a process called glass transition.

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