The Art of Creation: Sculpting Life Through Waves of Cell Death

During embryonic development, cells proliferate and differentiate to form the tissues and organs of multicellular organisms. Paradoxically, these life-creating processes are often accompanied by large-scale cell death— a phenomenon documented since the nineteenth century. Yet, the mechanism driving large-scale cell death, and its functional role in development, have remained a century-old mystery. Sheng-hong Chen and his team uncovered that cell death can be coordinated in space and time through trigger waves of ferroptosis (top left). Ferroptosis propagation accompanies the massive, yet spatially-restricted, cell death events during muscle remodeling of the embryonic limb, substantiating its utility as a tissue-sculpting strategy for organogenesis (top right and bottom).