Our world is made up of elegant shapes — there’s the square, the rectangle, the sphere, the prism and many more. But sometimes, these shapes don’t quite fit nature’s game board.
Sometimes, you also need a “scutoid.”
Scientists discovered this shape while studying nature’s way of moulding tissue to form the skin, cavity linings and the building blocks of organs. It’s likely found in your armpits, up on your nose and all over your face, as it’s a shape your skin cells take as they bend.
The cells, called epithelial cells, line most surfaces in an animal’s body, including the skin, other organs and blood vessels. These cells are typically described in biology books as column-like or having some sort of prism shape — two parallel faces and a certain number of parallelogram sides.
However, to pack themselves into the tricky curves and bends of an organ, they take up the shape of a scutoid (SCOO-toid)
The shape has five sides on one end and six on the other and a triangular surface on one of its longer edges.
Scientists have referred to it as a twisted prism kind of shape that allows the tissue to mould around organs.
By packing into scutoids, the cells minimize their energy use and maximize how stable they are when they pack. Using microscopy and computer imaging, the team confirmed that cells found in fruit fly salivary glands and cells in zebrafish were indeed scutoid-shaped. Researchers believe these scutoid-shaped
cells exist in any curved sheet of epithelial cells— even in humans.
The scientists named the shape “scutoid” after a triangle-shaped part of a beetle’s thorax called the scutellum.
