NEWS AND VIEWS

26 October 2026

How and when did cells gain the ability to crawl? Live imaging of cells from close relatives of early eukaryotes fills in a major gap in the understanding of cellular evolution.

By

Margaret A. Titus Margaret A. Titus is in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.

The ability of cells to move through the environment is crucial for their survival — enabling them to seek out food or flee from danger. Writing in Nature , Radler et al. 1 shed light on how such crawling motility evolved.

Nature 658 , 1132-1133 (2026)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-03259-w

References

Radler, P. et al. Nature 658 , 1218–1225 (2026).

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Fritz-Laylin, L. K. & Titus, M. A. Mol. Biol. Cell 34 , 7 (2023).

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Spang, A. et al. Nature 521 , 173–179 (2015).

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Rodrigues-Oliveira, T. et al.…