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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1992 Sep 1;89(17):8288–8292. doi: 10.1073/pnas.89.17.8288

Rudimentary form of cellular "vision".

G Albrecht-Buehler 1
PMCID: PMC49903  PMID: 1518860

Abstract

BHK cells were inoculated sparsely on one face ("sparse- or s-face") of a thin glass film whose opposite face was covered with a 2- to 3-day-old confluent layer of BHK cells ("confluent- or c-face"). After 7 hr of attaching and spreading in the absence of visible light, most of the cells on the s-face traversed with their long axes the direction of the whorls of the confluent cells on the c-face directly opposed. The effect was inhibited by a thin metal coating of the glass films. The results suggest that the cells were able to detect the orientation of others by signals that penetrated glass but not thin metallic films and, therefore, appeared to be carried by electromagnetic radiation. In contrast, the effect was not influenced by a thin coat of silicone on the glass, suggesting that the wavelength of this radiation is likely to be in the red to infrared range. The ability of cells to detect the direction of others by electromagnetic signals points to a rudimentary form of cellular "vision."

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

  1. Albrecht-Buehler G. Surface extensions of 3T3 cells towards distant infrared light sources. J Cell Biol. 1991 Aug;114(3):493–502. doi: 10.1083/jcb.114.3.493. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

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