Image of the Month: Breast cancer cell clusters
Triple-negative breast cancer cell cluster stained with extracellular matrix component hyaluronan (green), marking the borders among cells, and the desmosome protein Desmoplakin (red), stabilizing cell-cell interactions. Cell nuclei are in blue. Image courtesy of the C. Cheng lab.
The Image of the Month shows a triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) cell cluster, a conformation used by breast cancer cells to boost their ability to metastasize or spread to other tissues where they can seed new tumors.
“Scientists know that circulating tumor cells (CTC) are more likely to give rise to new tumors when they travel in clusters rather than as single cells. Clusters survive better and lodge in new organs more easily,” said Dr. Chonghui Cheng. “But we did not know how TNBC cells maintained a cluster formation.”
Cheng, Dr. Georg Bobkov, Dr. Khushali Patel and their colleagues reported in Nature Communications a mechanism that mediates cluster formation in these cells and how it promotes cancer metastasis.
Would you like to learn more? Read an interview with authors, here.
