Профиль

With 20+yrs of mechanistic insight, a new excitement around extrusion was on full display at 1st #CellExit meeting, joining researchers from development, mechanics, stem cells, cancer and regeneration. Meeting report is coming out soon! bsky.app/profile/leva...

From Virchow's desquamation in 1882 to modern organoids and force microscopy, the question remained remarkably similar: how do tissues safely remove cells? Today, the field is not being reinvented - it’s gaining access. What we discover next may be driven as much by new observations as by new ideas.

Wrapping up, this thread covered only a small fraction of the work shaping the extrusion field: @levayerr.bsky.social @yap-lab.bsky.social @bladoux.bsky.social @sarawickstrom.bsky.social @hansclevers.bsky.social @xaviertrepat.bsky.social + others not on Bluesky + more whose work I couldn’t include.

📄 Levayer & Grata, 2025 Looking for a great mechanistic #overview? This JCS poster review from 2025 beautifully summarizes the molecular, cellular and mechanical mechanisms that drive epithelial cell extrusion across systems. It was an instant classic…

📄 Villeneuve2026 bit.ly/4w3jB4X 📄 King2026 Beyond classical extrusion: in skin, tissue mechanics regulates how cells leave the basal layer during differentiation and multilayer formation. Where does monolayer extrusion end and #delamination begin? The boundaries are intriguingly blurry

Видео

Homecoming: there is some historical satisfaction here. One of the earliest descriptions of epithelial cell loss was Virchow's 1882 study of intestinal desquamation. More than 140 years later, #organoids, live imaging and force measurements are finally revealing how intestinal cells leave the tissue

📄 Matejčić et al., The mechanism? We found that extrusion begins with local adhesion loss in a stressed villus cell (Ca2+->calpain->cut focal adhesions) Neighbor #lamellipodia can now invade:they generate upward forces to break symmetry,helping determine the direction of cell expulsion

Видео

📄 Krüger et al., 2025 #Intestinal organoids are bringing extrusion into one of its native contexts: tissue renewal. This work linked extrusion to mechanical competition, dependent on a basal actomyosin network and local myosin dynamics in the villus tissue.

📄 Schoenit et al., 2025: Extrusion as mechanical #competition: force transmission across epithelia regulates mechanical cell competition. A cell's fate depends not only on itself, but also on how forces are distributed in the surrounding tissue.

Видео

📄 Villars et al., 2023 doi.org/10.1242/dev.... Deep learning for quantitative extrusion: as imaging datasets grew larger and computation advanced, #DeXtrusion enabled automated detection and analysis of extrusion events across tissues and conditions.

Видео

📄 Saw et al., 2017 📄 Chan Jin Jie et al., 2025: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Enter shape studies: topological #defects and curvature in epithelial organization predict sites of cell death and extrusion, linking tissue geometry, order, stress and cell elimination through active-matter physics.

Видео

E-cad junctional tension is a crucial regulator.Low force transmission allows live cells to extrude & invade.Around dying cells,neighbors activate RhoA,but high junctional tension prevents their removal from monolayers bit.ly/4ej6Xst bit.ly/4eSIkmv buff.ly/hu5otFf

📄 Monier et al., 2015 doi.org/10.1038/natu... Magali Suzanne’s lab showed that apoptotic cells generate apico-basal forces that drive epithelial folding. Again, cell elimination is not only housekeeping… It can actively sculpt tissues out of the main epithelial plane.

Видео

📄 Toyama et al., 2008 doi.org/10.1126/scie... Eliminated cells generate force: apoptotic cells during Drosophila development generate forces that contribute to tissue dynamics and morphogenesis, linking cell death to tissue mechanics beyond homeostasis.

📄 Eisenhoffer et al., 2012 A surprise: cells do not need to die to be extruded. Tissue crowding can trigger live-cell extrusion through mechanosensitive pathways, revealing extrusion as a mechanism for epithelial homeostasis and population control.

📄 Rosenblatt et al., 2001 The start of a field: apoptotic epithelial cells signal their neighbors to expel them while preserving barrier integrity. Cell loss was no longer passive shedding, but an active process coordinated by the tissue.

Cell extrusion is having a moment... Histologists noted epithelial shedding, desquamation and exfoliation still in the 19th century. Over the last 20 yrs, work across many systems revealed extrusion as an active, tissue-scale process. Now, new tools, models & communities are bringing fresh questions

About differentiated keratinocytes in wound-healing bsky.app/profile/epim...

Thanks for following along! bsky.app/profile/epim...

Thanks to all the labs that have shaped this field. Only a small subset is highlighted here. @jbwallingford.bsky.social @wallaceucsf.bsky.social @kuba-sedzinski.bsky.social Arturo Alvarez-Buylla lab Brian Mitchell lab Chad Pearson lab Paris Skourides lab Sachiko Tsukita lab