Tracking cell fate through morphodynamics

Cell state transitions are an important feature of both development and disease. Most of what we know about these transitions derives from single cell molecular measurements which only capture static snapshots of a highly dynamic process. The field of morphodynamics broadly exemplified by the recent work of Tolonen et al aims to address these shortcomings by using live imaging to capture the morphological changes associated with differentiating cells. Their goal is to create a computational pipeline to analyze phenomics in order to determine cell fate, ultimately increasing understanding of cell state transitions and functioning tissues. Dorr and Mitchell discuss the study by Tolonen et al where they employ morphodynamic profiling with modeling, which reveals changes in cell and nuclear geometry that encode cell fate during mucociliary epithelial differentiation.