Newnham’s Vice Principal has led 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 two-year study was carried out in the Cambridge laboratory of Professor Christine Watson by Bethan Lloyd-Lewis, Felicity Davis and Newnham graduate student Olivia Harris.
Their work has been published today in Nature Communications and it is the first time that anyone has marked a single mammary stem cell and followed what happens to the daughter cells.
The work will pave the way for scientists to understand how normal stem cell behaviour leads to the formation of cancer cells.
Professor Watson said: “The cells of the breast undergo a massive expansion during puberty and pregnancy, a process that requires mammary stem cells.
“The capacity of a single stem cell to produce thousands of daughter cells was elegantly demonstrated in entire mouse mammary glands by combining techniques that render the tissue transparent with 3-dimensional fluorescence imaging. This technique could be used to understand how cancer cells evolve.”
Read their study in Nature Communications
Picture caption: The dancing rainbow: a growing and branching breast duct with each cell colour coded for depth in 3D. The red cells are closest and blue cells are farthest away.