Authors: Tomonobu M. Watanabe | Tsuyoshi Shiina
Source: Biophysics and Physicobiology (article, 2024-01-01)
Field: Chemistry — Physical and Theoretical Chemistry

Visualizing Singularity Phenomenon In a multicellular system, cells interact and communicate with the surrounding cells.A small number of cells that considerably impact the surrounding cells emerge, either by chance or necessity.When the cell-cell interaction centered in these minority cells triggers an avalanche of cell-cell interactions, the multicellular system irreversibly undergoes a phase transition with a collective state transition of the cells.In the case that the phase transition is essential or fatal for life phenomena, such as development, metamorphosis, and lesions, the minority cell is defined as a "singularity cell," and the phase transition is defined as a "singularity phenomenon."This definition is nominal.Systems in life constantly undergo phase transitions as physical phenomena, regardless of whether an observer is looking.Based on this definition, humans can explore mechanisms that only exist in life rather than complex combinations of physical principles.In conventional biology, which is based on statistical quantification using average values, the emergence of singularity cells is recognized as an outlier and has not been experimentally predicted because of its extreme rarity.In recent years, owing to the development of single-cell omics technologies, experimental data in life sciences have become more complex and voluminous, enabling the detection of rare-emerged minority cells.However, they could not prove a causal relationship between minority cells and the system phase transition because of the lack of temporal information in the data.It is necessary to measure the dynamic parameters that can quantitatively represent the state of cells and the system rather than screening for parameters that express the cell state in more detail to discover singularity cells.The basic procedure for experimentally identifying singularity cells is as follows: (1) macroscopically detect the phase transition of an entire system; (2) microscopically and retrogradely search all cells for candidates of the starting cell of the avalanche of cell state transition and (or) cell-cell interaction; and (3) theoretically or mathematically screen the candidate cells for the singularity cell causally related to the phase transition.Therefore, the first principle of visualization in singularity biology is to "see the forest for the trees."This means that the behaviors of all cells and cell-cell interactions comprise a multicellular system everywhere, with simultaneous observation of the dynamic behavior of the system.This poses physical dilemmas for measurement systems, for example, a wide field of view and high resolution are incompatible in an optical microscope.Innovations in elemental technology will gradually resolve these dilemmas; the abovementioned incompatibility can be overcome by specially upsizing the apertures of the objective lens and detector [1,2].On the other hand, in the era of singularity biology, not only specification improvements but also simplifying and lowering prices are needed, because various trials to discover singularity cells in the various biological events are what will establish singularity biology as a new discipline.Research management team overcame that physical dilemma using only a combination of simple machinery.They adopted a machine vision camera and telecentric macro lens instead of an objective lens at the expense of three- Multicellular organism ; Singularity ; Phenomenon ; Phase transition ; Transition (genetics) ; Collective behavior ; Cell ; Computer science ; Physics ; Statistical physics ; Biology ; Mathematics ; Sociology ; Condensed matter physics ; Quantum mechanics ; Genetics thermodynamics and calorimetric analyses ; Spaceflight effects on biology ; Cellular Mechanics and Interactions