SOUTH BEND, January 28, 2012 – Women in South Bend will be pleased to learn that scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) recently discovered a rotational motion that normal breast cells use in forming acini in the mammary gland.
The rotation, called "CAMo," for coherent angular motion, is essential for forming spheres. Without CAMo, cellular spheres are not formed, which can lead to random motion, loss of structure and malignancy.
"What is most exciting to me about this stunning discovery is that it may finally give us a handle by which to discover the physical laws of cellular motion as they apply to biology," says Mina Bissell, a leading authority on breast cancer and distinguished scientist with Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division.
Bissell and Kanice Tanner, a post-doctoral physicist in Bissell’s research group, are authors of a paper describing this work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other authors were Hidetoshi Mori, Rana Mroue and Alexandre Bruni-Cardoso, also members of Bissell's research group.
Healthy human epithelial cells in breast and other glandular tissue form either sphere-shaped acini or tube-shaped ducts. The cell and tissue polarity in acini is essential for healthy breasts. In fact, polarity loss due to cells not forming spheres is an early sign of malignancy. Prior to this research, released by Berkeley Lab January 26, 2012, how epithelial cells assembled into spheres that are similar in size and shape to organs in vivo was a mystery.
"We've discovered a novel type of cell motility where single cells undergo multiple rotations and cohesively maintain that rotational motion as they divide and assemble into acini," says Tanner. "We've also demonstrated that this CAMo is a critical function for the establishment of spherical architecture and not simply a consequence of multicellular aggregates. If CAMo is disrupted, the final geometry is not a sphere."
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