Chew Chai, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, was watching flatworm cells respond to a hormone when a subset of them did something no one had described. Under live microscopy, they burst open, released contents that killed everything nearby, and disappeared entirely within five minutes.
She and senior author Bo Wang named the cells ruptoblasts and the process ruptosis. Their findings appeared in Cell on June 2 and recirculated widely in early August.
