New article from SCI Affiliate Christine Watson's Lab published in Nature Communications describes a ground-breaking project which tracked the fate of ‘daughter cells’ to find out how cancer moves around the breast from a single stem cell.
The cells of the breast undergo a massive expansion during puberty and with every pregnancy, a process that requires mammary stem cells. In this study the capacity of a single stem cell to produce hundreds and thousands of daughter cells was elegantly demonstrated in entire mouse mammary glands by combining new techniques that render the tissue transparent with 3D fluorescence imaging, allowing visualisation of the glands in three dimensions.
This work paves the way for understanding how perturbation of normal stem cell behaviour can give rise to breast cancer.
Publication details:
Davis FM, Lloyd-Lewis B, Harris OBS, Kozar S, Winton DJ, Muresan L, Watson CJ. Single-cell lineage tracing in the mammary gland reveals stochastic clonal dispersion of stem/progenitor cell progeny. Nature Communications. PMID: 27779190
S= SCI Student