Animal cells can communicate

SCIENTISTS have found that typical cells in animals have the ability to transmit and receive biological signals by making physical contact with each other, even at long distance. The finding directly contradicts the standard biological model of animal cell communication. The newly discovered mechanism is similar to the way neurons communicate cells.
     It goes against the standard understanding that the non-neuronal cells "basically  spit out signalling proteins into extracellular fluid and hope they find the right target," said senior study investigator Thomas B Kornberg, a professor of biochemistry with the University of California - San Francisco Cardiovascular Research institute.
Working with living tissue from Drosophila - fruit flies - Kornberg and his team demonstrated that cells send out long, thin tubes of cytoplasm called cytonemes, which Kornberg said "can extend across the length of 50 or 100 cells" before touching the cells they are targeting. The point of contact between a cytoneme and its target cell acts as a communications bridge between the two cells.
  "It's long been known that neurons communicate in a similar way - by transferring signals at point s of contact called synapses, and transmitting the response over long distances in long tubes called axons, "said Kornberg.
"We have now shown that many types of animal cells have the  same ability to reach out and synapse with one another in order to communicate, using signalling proteins as units of information instead of the neurotransmitters and electrical impulses that neurons use, "he said.
"I would argue that the only strong experimental data that exists today for a mechanism by which these signalling proteins move from one cell to another is at these points of contact and via cytonemes.
"There are 100 years worth of work and thousands of scientific papers in which it has been simply assumed that these proteins move from one cell to another by moving through extrcellular fluid."
"So this is a fundamentally different way of considering how signalling goes  on in tissues, " Kornberg said.