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Schroeder and colleagues review the development and application of single-cell technologies — from gene and protein expression to clonal labelling, lineage tracing and time-lapse imaging — in stem cell research.
Expansion of a vascular network requires breaking through the basement membrane, a highly crosslinked barrier that tightly adheres to mature vessels. Angiogenic endothelial cells are now shown to form podosome rosettes that are able to focally degrade the extracellular matrix, prior to vascular sprouting in tumour angiogenesis.
Seano, Primo and colleagues report that blood vessel branching during tumour angiogenesis is mediated by the formation of podosome rosettes that depends on VEGF-A and integrin α6β1.
Myoepithelial cells considered terminally differentiated are now shown by Stingl and colleagues to have stem cell properties in vitro, to repopulate a mammary gland on transplantation and to behave as stem cells by lineage tracing.
Shen and colleagues report the in vitro generation of organoids from mouse luminal epithelial progenitor cells and normal or transformed prostate tissue, and extend this approach to the formation of normal and tumour organoids of human origin
O’Neill and colleagues find that the Hippo kinase LATS1 is part of an ATR-dependent response to stalled replication forks and protects RAD51 nucleofilaments on single strand DNA.
Sibilia and colleagues report that IL-1-dependent EGFR induction in liver macrophages is needed to stimulate IL-6 production, which in turn promotes hepatocyte proliferation and hepatocellular carcinoma formation.
Mendelsohn and colleagues use lineage tracing in a mouse model of bladder cancer to show that different progenitor cell populations give rise to distinct types of urothelial and squamous cell carcinomas.
Kalluri and colleagues find that mitochondrial biogenesis and respiration induced by transcriptional coactivator PGC-1α in cancer cells promote cancer metastasis and that PGC-1α expression is associated with invasive breast cancer.
Kang and colleagues demonstrate that the ΔNp63 isoform of p63 upregulates the expression of the Fzd7 Wnt receptor to promote normal and cancer stem cell activity in the mammary gland.
