Communication between cells in plants, animals and humans takes place via specialized connecting structures. An international team led by biologists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and involving the University of Tübingen has now discovered that the regulation of very similar structures was already present in multicellular bacteria, implying that it must have originated much earlier in the course of evolution. In their paper published in The EMBO Journal, the researchers describe how the exchange of calcium plays a central role in bacteria, just as it does in humans.

Communication between cells in plants, animals and humans takes place via specialized connecting structures. An international team led by biologists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and involving the University of Tübingen has now discovered that the regulation of very similar structures was already present in multicellular bacteria, implying that it must have originated much earlier in the course of evolution. In their paper published in The EMBO Journal, the researchers describe how the exchange of calcium plays a central role in bacteria, just as it does in humans.

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