Dangerous liaisons

摘要

The cells of multicellular organisms are highly communicative and so can strongly influence one another's behaviour. One line of communication is particularly important in keeping cell growth in check. A single cell destined to become a tissue or an organism can't go it alone in its rise to such dizzy heights. Communication, in the form of direct contacts between cells, interactions between cells and their surroundings, or the transmission of biochemical signals, is essential. Unravelling these networks of communication has pro-vided gainful employment for biologists, geneticists and mathematicians in their quest to understand how the body forms. But now cancer biologists are being drawn into a similar web of interactions between cells targeted to become tumours (usually epithelial cells) and their neighbours (stromal fibroblasts). A network of signals operates in tumours. As they describe in Science, Bhowmick et al. have identified one signalling pathway ― regulated by transforming growth factor β (TGF-β) ╚D that is an important mediator of the stromal-epithelial interactions modulating the growth of solid tumours.