“Hey! Where’s that cancer cell going?” and “M-cells, gateways to the mucosal immune system”, in my picks of the week from RB

Another week has gone by and some very interesting molbio blog posts have been aggregated to Researchblogging.org. Every week [see my opening post on the matter], I'll select some blog posts I consider particularly interesting in the field of molecular biology [see here to get a sense of the criteria that will be used], briefly describe them and list them here for you to check out.

Note that I'm only taking into consideration the molbio-related blog posts aggregated under "Biology".

Congratulations to everyone who got their post selected.

1) As we’ve discussed before, tissue invasion and metastasis are hallmarks of cancer. Cells from primary tumor masses can travel and colonize the same or different organ sites leading to the formation of secondary tumors. Importantly, these “metastases” are the cause of 90% of human cancer-related deaths.
The first step towards metastasis involves the “movement of cancer cells into tissue surrounding the tumour, and the vasculature”. This generates lots of questions: What makes cancer cells motile? How do these cells move?

Lab Rat discusses a review commenting on the mechanisms underlying the motility of cancer cells.

2. In the gastrointestinal tract, the largest mucosal membrane surface in the human body, the highly specialized M-cells play an important sentinel role by sampling and transporting antigens from the lumen of the small intestine, to underlying mucosal lymphoid tissues (in a process called antigen transcytosis), where antigen-specific immune responses are evoked. Despite the importance of this process, the molecular mechanisms underlying this antigen uptake are largely unknown.

Geek discusses a recent article in Nature reporting “that glycoprotein 2, specifically expressed on the apical plasma membrane of M cells among enterocytes, serves as a transcytotic receptor for mucosal antigens” by recognizing a component of type I pili on bacteria.


That's it for this week. Stay tuned for more MolBio Research Highlights!

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Some of the articles discussed in this week's selected posts:

SAHAI, E. (2005). Mechanisms of cancer cell invasion Current Opinion in Genetics & Development, 15 (1), 87-96 DOI: 10.1016/j.gde.2004.12.002

Hase, K., Kawano, K., Nochi, T., Pontes, G., Fukuda, S., Ebisawa, M., Kadokura, K., Tobe, T., Fujimura, Y., Kawano, S., Yabashi, A., Waguri, S., Nakato, G., Kimura, S., Murakami, T., Iimura, M., Hamura, K., Fukuoka, S., Lowe, A., Itoh, K., Kiyono, H., & Ohno, H. (2009). Uptake through glycoprotein 2 of FimH+ bacteria by M cells initiates mucosal immune response Nature, 462 (7270), 226-230 DOI: 10.1038/nature08529