Cancer stem cells: Tracing clones.

摘要

The cancer stem cell (CSC) theory of tumour propagation has experienced a relative roller-coaster ride over the past few years. Now, three papers that use lineage tracing to look at the contribution of individual cells to the tumour mass indicate that the CSC theory is back on the up.All three papers used tamoxifen-inducible Cre-Lox technologies to express fluorescent proteins in different tissues. Luis F. Parada and colleagues crossed mice with green fluorescent protein (GFP)-labelled cells in the subventricular zone of the brain - a known residence of neural stem cells - with glioma-prone mice and found that the GFP~+ tumour cell subset was quiescent compared with GFP~- progenitor cells.