In this issue, Tosoni et al. (2015. J. Cell Biol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1083/jcb.201505037) report that cell fate determinant and tumor suppressor Numb imposes asymmetric cell divisions in mammary stem cells by regulating p53. Numb thereby restricts mammary stem cell expansion and controls the proliferation and lineage-specific characteristics of their progeny.

The p16(INK4a) tumour suppressor has an established role in the implementation of cellular senescence in stem/progenitor cells, which is thought to contribute to organismal ageing. However, since p16(INK4a) knockout mice die prematurely from cancer, whether p16(INK4a) reduces longevity remains unclear. Here we show that, in mutant mice homozygous for a hypomorphic allele of the α-klotho ageing-...

The biological significance and deregulation of the Hippo pathway during organ growth and tumorigenesis have received a surge of interest in the past decade. The Hippo pathway core kinases, MST1/2 and LATS1/2, are tumor suppressors that inhibit the oncogenic nuclear function of YAP/TAZ and TEAD. In addition to earlier studies that highlight the role of Hippo pathway in organ size control, cell ...

During cell competition fitter cells take over the tissue at the expense of viable, but less fit, cells, which are eliminated by induction of apoptosis or senescence. This probably acts as a quality-control mechanism to eliminate suboptimal cells and safeguard organ function. Several experimental conditions have been shown to trigger cell competition, including differential levels in ribosomal ...

Gliomas express many genes that play a role in neural precursor cells (NPCs), but no direct comparison between glioma and stem cell (SC) gene expression profiles has been performed. To investigate the similarities and differences between gliomas and SCs, we compared the microRNA (miRNA) expression signatures of glial tumors, embryonic SCs (ESCs), NPCs, and normal adult brains from both human an...

background: an explosion of research has been done in discovering how human health is affected by environmental factors. i will discuss the impacts of environmental cancer causing factors and how they continue to cause multiple disruptions in cellular networking. some risk factors may not cause cancer. other factors initiate consecutive genetic mutations that would eventually alter the normal p...

Identifying new regulators of the stem cell state offers potential for future gains in biomedicine. Evidence that the tumor suppressor p53 is a key regulator of the stem cell state (Cicalese et al., 2009) suggests a broad role for this protein and its pathways in the control of normal tissue homeostasis and tumor formation.

In an earlier poster paper (1) we proposed that cancer can be viewed not only as a fatal disease but also as a local aberrant, rejuvenation, in an organism, and this fact can be useful for developing new anti-aging and anti-cancer treatments. In this paper we provide additional evidence from human and experimental animal studies in support of this view. First, we discuss cancer genes as candida...

Objective(s): The growing trend of research demonstrates that dynamic expression of two metastasis repressor classes (metastasis suppressor genes and anti-metastatic miRNA) has a close relationship with tumor invasion and metastasis. Using different strategies, it was revealed that cellular levels of miR-31 and Breast cancer Metastasis Suppressor1 (BRMS1) protein, whic...

Background: Aberrant methylation of cytosine-guanine dinucleotide islands leads to inactivation of tumor suppressor genes in breast cancer. Tumor suppressor genes are unmethylated in normal tissue and often become hypermethylated during tumor formation, leading to gene silencing. We investigated the association between E-cadherin (CDH1) and estrogen receptor-α (ESRα) gene promoter methylation a...