Sorting Things Out: Cell Sorting during Hydra Regeneration

Hydra, a fascinating freshwater cnidarian famous for being able to regenerate fully after having been dissociated into single cells and recombined into a heterogeneous aggregate (1), plays an important role in our understanding of the process of cell sorting (2,3). Cell sorting describes the phenomenon where a mixed population of cells spontaneously sorts into distinct tissues, and a crucial early step of Hydra regeneration is that the initially heterogeneous aggregate of cells spontaneously sorts into a sphere-within-a-sphere structure with ectodermal cells on the outside and endodermal cells within (see Fig. 1).

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