By taking precise measurements of a key molecule called ATP, which stores and releases the body\u2019s energy, and mapping concentrations of ATP over the length of a tissue in a growing embryo, the team was able to know precisely where and when a fold would appear. This predictive power gives scientists a new lens on organ development and opens the door to engineering healthy tissue or addressing disorders with greater control.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the study tells us is that we need to be considering energy and metabolism as an intricate part of everything the cell and tissue does, including something that had seemed, previously, to be so far removed as the generation of force,\u201d said principal investigator Celeste Nelson<\/a>, the Wilke Family Professor in Bioengineering and professor of chemical and biological engineering<\/a>.<\/p>\n Previous frameworks for studying organ development did not consider a cell\u2019s energy budget as a relevant metric, according to the researchers.<\/p>\n \u201cBefore this, you usually would think about the energy budget of the whole embryo,\u201d said Bezia Lemma, the paper\u2019s first author. He said what did not exist is a clear picture of how energy changes vary across the space of individual organs.<\/p>\n The key innovation was to reimagine how metabolism acts on the structures of a developing body \u2014\u00a0in effect, to view metabolism in spatial terms at the level of both the cell and the tissue.<\/p>\n \u201cEnergy metabolism in this context, of cells doing things to build tissues, has mostly been ignored in the past,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cWe lacked tools, we lacked insight. Metabolism was always seen as this kind of boring subject that you have to memorize, and then you move on.\u201d<\/p>\n Lemma joined Nelson\u2019s lab as a postdoctoral fellow with a background in physics and a specialty in understanding how energy drives motion at small scales. He wanted to build on Nelson\u2019s previous work explaining tissues in terms of their physical forces and see if other patterns emerged based on cells\u2019 underlying energy systems.<\/p>\n What he found surprised them both. Mitochondria, which release ATP and are often called the powerhouses of the cell, would crowd a particular point along one side of a developing tissue just before a crease appeared, the first fold of a developing nose or eye.<\/p>\n \u201cThe way the eyeball functions is related to its shape, right?\u201d Nelson said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t get that shape, you can\u2019t see very well. And the source of age-related loss of vision is an alteration in the shape of the lens and the eye in general.\u201d<\/p>\n Addressing shape using the predictive power of energy metabolism could unlock new technologies to probe and improve human health.<\/p>\n While the developing eyeball in mouse embryos stood out as the most striking organ they studied, the researchers looked at several other systems including fruit flies and chicken lungs, where they first identified the phenomenon. In all of the systems they studied, they observed similar spatial patterns, where an enormous amount of mitochondria appeared at a specific location, released ATP, and a fold would form.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the era of spatial transcriptomics, where people are thinking about gene signaling in space,\u201d Lemma said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to do the same with energy and forces.\u201d<\/p>\n ==<\/p>\n![\"Portrait](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/20190125_nelsonc_bulk_tr20190205_0141_1600x900-1024x576.jpg\")
Photo of Celeste Nelson by Tori Repp\/Fotobuddy<\/p>\n