Macroscopic quorum sensing sustains differentiating embryonic stem cells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cells can secrete molecules that help each other's replication. In cell cultures, chemical signals might diffuse only within a cell colony or between colonies. A chemical signal's interaction length-how far apart interacting cells are-is often assumed to be some value without rigorous justifications because molecules' invisible paths and complex multicellular geometries pose challenges. Here we present an approach, combining mathematical models and experiments, for determining a chemical signal's interaction length. With murine embryonic stem (ES) cells as a testbed, we found that differentiating ES cells secrete FGF4, among others, to communicate over many millimeters in cell culture dishes and, thereby, form a spatially extended, macroscopic entity that grows only if its centimeter-scale population density is above a threshold value. With this 'macroscopic quorum sensing', an isolated macroscopic, but not isolated microscopic, colony can survive differentiation. Our integrated approach can determine chemical signals' interaction lengths in generic multicellular communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".