Tunnelling Nanotubes: Life's Secret Network
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Watkins thinks that the dendritic cells could be using nanotubes to recruit other cells. Conventional wisdom says that once a dendritic cell is activated, it migrates to the lymph nodes to alert the immune system. Sometimes, it might have to travel from the tip of one's finger to the armpit - a long and perilous journey that could result in failure. But if a dendritic cell first recruits other sentinels, and all of them march towards the lymph nodes simultaneously, there is much less chance of the message being lost. "It allows you to amplify the response," says Watkins. "That's all hypothesis really. We have to prove it."
What will be interesting is how the presence of tunnels affect these analysis, or better yet, whether mining the data would reveal the presence of the tunnelling nanotubes.
Basically, the assumption that cells are enclosed units with isolated internal cytoplasm--the very definition of the word 'cell', over 100 years old--would no longer hold.
As the article explains, medicine is up for a review. Many aspects of protein prions, HIV, and who knows how many other illnesses are suddenly explainable.
There are also other engineering disciplines that analyzes biology as a source of inspiration. I think abstracting the concept of transit, hidden networks will go a long way towards constructing self-building nanotechs.