During development, dendritic outgrowth is guided by an interplay among various factors, including evoked and spontaneous activity, chemical guidance cues and mechanical forces. The last of these is poorly understood, but in a new paper, Tao et al. show that in Caenorhabditis elegans, the mechanical forces encountered by dendrites during outgrowth are transduced by mechanosensitive channels into local Ca2+ transients that influence dendritic guidance.

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