Study Reveals Importance Of Timing For Cellular Signals, Suggests Possible Tactic For Cancer Therapeutics
Magic tricks work because they take advantage of the brain’s sensory assumptions, tricking audiences into seeing phantoms or overlooking sleights of hand. Now a team of UC San Francisco researchers has discovered that even brainless single-celled yeast have sensory biases that can be hacked by a carefully engineered illusion, a finding that could be used to develop new approaches to fighting diseases such as cancer.
“The ability to perceive and respond to the environment is a basic attribute of all living organisms, from the greatest to the smallest,” said Wendell Lim, PhD, the study’s senior author. “And so is the susceptibility to misperception. It doesn’t matter if the illusion is based on molecular sensors within a single cell or neurons in the brain.”
In the new study, published online Nov. 19, 2015 in Science Express, Lim and his team discovered that yeast cells falsely perceive a specifically timed pattern of stress – caused by alternating between low and mildly increased sodium levels – as a massive, continuously increasing ramp of stress. In response, the microbes end up over-responding and killing themselves. The results, Lim says, suggest a whole new way of looking at the perceptual abilities of simple cells and could even be used to develop new approaches to fighting diseases using the power of illusion.
Timing of stress response is yeast cells’ ‘Achilles heel’
“This discovery was a bit of an accident actually,” said Lim, chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF, director of the UCSF Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. “We were interested in the general issue of how cells interpret information over time. Frequency is a key aspect of all our communications, whether it’s hearing language or transmitting radio signals, but do cells themselves use this kind of information? It’s something we don’t know much about.”
To explore this question, two postdoctoral fellows in Lim’s lab, Ping Wei, PhD, now at Peking University School of Life Sciences, and Amir Mitchell, PhD, set up a system that allowed them to expose yeast to a mild stressor – a small increase in salt in the yeast’s environment – and to oscillate between the increased salt level and the baseline level at different frequencies.
Normally, sensor molecules in a yeast cell detect changes in salt concentration and instruct the cell to respond by producing a protective chemical. After this transient response, the cell can resume growing happily as if conditions had not changed. The researchers found that the cells were perfectly capable of adapting when they flipped the salt stress on and off every minute or every 32 minutes. But to their surprise, when they tried an eight-minute oscillation of precisely the same salt level the cells quickly stopped growing and began to die off.
“That was just a jaw-dropping moment,” said Mitchell. “These cells should be able to handle this level of osmotic stress, but at one particular frequency they just go haywire. We’d never seen anything like this before.”
Could sensory illusions be used to fight cancer?
Mitchell, who was first author on the new study, went on to inspect the cellular mechanism underlying this unexpected, frequency-dependent toxicity. Using mathematical modeling and experiments in which he tweaked the molecular wiring of the mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway that mediates the cells’ salt-sensing system, he revealed a sensory misperception: Because of the way the MAPK pathway is set up, the cells interpret an eight-minute oscillation as an ever-increasing staircase of salt concentration. This leads to excessive activation of the cells’ protective response, and ultimately to their death (see Movie).
Read more: Sensory Illusion Causes Cells to Self-Destruct
The Latest on: Cancer Therapeutics
[google_news title=”” keyword=”Cancer Therapeutics” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
via Google News
The Latest on: Cancer Therapeutics
- Europe Liver Cancer Therapeutics Market Is at the Cusp of Crossing CAGR of 8.95% N 2023-2030on February 8, 2023 at 7:47 am
The Europe liver cancer therapeutics market is projected to grow in the coming years, driven by the increasing incidence of liver cancer and advancements in treatment options. Liver cancer, also known ...
- Participación sevillana en el desarrollo de un fármaco para prevenir la cirrosis y el cáncer de hígadoon February 8, 2023 at 7:01 am
Investigadores del Instituto de Biomedicina de Sevilla forman parte de un consorcio de un consorcio español junto a el Cima Universidad de Navarra y Kintsugi Therapeutics Científicos sevillanos partic ...
- El IBIS de Sevilla participa en un consorcio que desarrolla un fármaco para prevenir la cirrosis y el cáncer de hígadoon February 8, 2023 at 4:17 am
La esteatosis hepática metabólica (EHmet) es una enfermedad que se caracteriza por la acumulación de grasa hepática (esteatosis), muerte celular (apoptosis), inflamación y fibrosis en el hígado. Su in ...
- Liver Cancer Therapeutics Market Size, Advancements, Growth, and Industry Analysis| Fortune Business Insightson February 7, 2023 at 9:10 pm
The global Liver Cancer Therapeutics Market size was USD 1,730.9 million in 2019.the global market will exhibit a stellar growth of 19.0% in 2020. The market is projected to grow from USD 2,037.5 ...
- Prostate Cancer Therapeutics Market 2023 is Booming Worldwide in the Upcoming years | Including 85 Pages Reporton February 7, 2023 at 6:16 pm
Prostate Cancer Therapeutics Market [85 Report Pages and 125 Number of Tables and Figures ] Insights 2023 by Types ...
- Onconova Therapeutics Touts Additional Positive Data For Rigosertib Monotherapy In Skin Cancer Settingon February 7, 2023 at 8:16 am
Onconova Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ: ONTX) announced that the second of two evaluable participants in the Phase 2 program of rigosertib in squamous cell carcinoma achieved a complete response of all ...
- Medsir ficha en Highlight Therapeutics a su nueva directora financieraon February 7, 2023 at 1:49 am
La compañía especializada en el diseño de ensayos clínicos y que centra su actividad en descubrir, mejorar y adaptar tratamientos para pacientes con cáncer ha incorporado a Gema Llorente a su equipo d ...
- Dragonfly Therapeutics anuncia que todos los derechos de DF6002 revierten a Dragonflyon February 6, 2023 at 4:01 am
- Dragonfly Therapeutics anuncia que todos los derechos de DF6002, su programa patentado de inmunoterapia en investigación con IL12, revierten a Dragonfly Dragonfly es ahora propietaria exclusiva de l ...
- Context Therapeutics highlights clinical responses from clinical trial evaluating ONA-XR to treat endometrial canceron February 6, 2023 at 3:15 am
Inc has highlighted encouraging clinical responses from its Phase 2 OATH clinical trial evaluating ONA-XR to treat endometrial cancer. The company said that two patients achieved a confirmed partial ...
- Nuevo enfoque para identificar dianas específicas del cáncer desconocidas y terapéuticamente relevanteson February 5, 2023 at 8:54 pm
Mnemo Therapeutics, una empresa biotecnológica francesa que desarrolla inmunoterapias transformadoras, ha anunciado en dos publicaciones en la revista 'Science Immunology', un enfoque novedoso para id ...
via Bing News