Developmental biologists try to understand how cells that are at first identical differentiate into the specialised cell types that make up tissues and organs.

Now researchers in the College of Life Sciences at Dundee, led by Professor Pauline Schaap, have identified a molecule called cyclic-di-GMP as being the `signal' which can induce differentiation into stalk cells.

The Schaap laboratory studies a simple multicellular organism, Dictyostelium, in which motile cells (those which can move spontaneously) differentiate into two immobile cell types: stalk cells and spores.

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