This Ancient Sea Creature Builds Its Body With a Whisper, not a Scream – The New York Times

Building a body from scratch is a daunting task, one that requires careful coordination among all those involved. Thats why natures starting stuff  cells have learned to be remarkably chatty to get the job done right.
Decades of experiments on embryos from fish, frogs and mice have painted a general picture of the way these cellular conversations often go. Cells will emit molecular signals that can diffuse deep into their environment, not unlike messages broadcast over radio waves. Such widely transmitted messages, which direct information to distant anatomical locales, have long been considered essential to the act of building a body.
It is what is discussed in textbooks, said Léo Guignard, a biologist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin.
But nature has developed subtler ways of sending messages, too.
By eavesdropping on the embryos of sea squirts, saclike filter feeders that inhabit the worlds shallow ocean floors, Dr. Guignard and his colleagues may have identified another way that burgeoning cells correspond. During their earliest days, sea squirt cells seem to exchange signals only with their nearest neighbors, rather than dispatching signals to cells that are farther afield, according to a paper published Thursday in Science.

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