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Not all cancer cells are created equal.
Some have mutations in their genes that make them better at getting around treatments
like chemo or radiotherapy.
Which means a tumor can develop therapeutic resistance,
where those treatments don’t work as well anymore.
And even just a few cells left over after treatment can turn into another tumor.
But new research might help scientists understand how cancer cells evolve their differences.
And that could help them understand and combat therapeutic resistance,
or develop even more targeted therapies in the future.
In this study, published in the journal Nature in December,
researchers looked at acute myeloid leukemia, a type of blood cancer.
They tracked cells in three slightly different mouse models of leukemia,
where all the mice had been infected with genetically identical cancer cells.
Researchers used a technique called SPLINTR,
which stands for Single-cell Profiling and Lineage Tracing, to track individual cells.
That would let them see which specific cells were doing something different,
and therefore could become the dominant cells that form new tumors.
SPLINTR works by tagging the DNA of individual cells with sequences of other DNA called barcodes.
Those barcodes let researchers see which bits of DNA
are actually being used by the cancer cell.
The barcodes are also inherited along with the cancer DNA,
meaning researchers can also track how the
cell evolves by seeing which bits of DNA stick around. ~
They found that even though all the cancer cells had the same genetics,
they behaved differently in different mice.
See, different cells can turn on different sets of genes,
or use the same genes more or less compared to other cells,
even if all those cells have the same DNA.
And because turning different genes on means that the cell will make different proteins,
cells that might look identical DNA-wise might actually act quite differently.
In the cancer paper, researchers were interested in understanding
which genes were transcribed in leukemia stem cells.
Those are the cells that are likely to become the dominant ones
and end up forming a new tumor.
Researchers saw that leukemia stem cells repressed genes
that tell the cancer cell to decorate itself with molecules that the immune system recognizes.
Those molecules match up with immune cells
that keep cancer under control by killing potentially dangerous cells.
Leukemia stem cells also expressed a gene for a particular tumor growth factor more.
Basically, they were better at being cancer-y.
This study is the first time researchers have been able
to study how individual cancer cells with the same genes might behave differently.
The hope now is that other scientists can use
the SPLINTR tool to study other types of cancer.
Because this finding could be really important
to the emerging field of personalized cancer treatments.
There’s a lot of interest in developing treatments tailored to the patient right now,
but our ability to do so mostly relies on looking for genetic differences underlying their cancer
or other disease.
What this study shows us is that researchers, and doctors, w
ill have to consider not just a disease’s genetic profile,
but how those genes are used, as well.
Now In other body-related news,
scientists might have just figured out the difference between hearing and actual listening.
Like, are you actually actively listening to your teacher go on about the Seven Years War,
or are you just like,vvy hearing them? ~
Because there does appear to be a difference.
In a study published this week in Cell Reports,
researchers looked at how a variety of factors influenced sound processing in the brain.
That included things like how engaged you are with a task.
As well as how much you move around; whether listening is actually rewarding in some way;
and finally your level of arousal, meaning how awake you are.
See, each of those things have been shown by previous studies
to actually change the activity
of certain groups of auditory neurons.
But it’s been hard to understand how those factors work together, across the whole brain.
This study looked at the activity of brain cells
in four different areas of mice brains while they took part in a listening task.
Each brain area is thought to be responsible for processing sound in different ways,
some more complex than others.
The mice had been trained to lick a spout
when a sound of a certain length and pitch played.
In one phase of the experiment, mice would get a sugary drink
as a reward when the sound played.
But in another phase, they didn’t.
The idea was that the mice would be less engaged with the listening task
if they weren’t being rewarded for it.
Indeed, the researchers saw a different pattern of brain activity
depending on whether a mouse was engaged with the test.
They broke this overall activity pattern down into 10 specific sub-patterns
based on each of the different aspects of the task.
That included engagement, but also how excited the mice were,
whether they were getting a reward, and the actual movement from licking itself.
They saw that mice who were more engaged
showed more activity in the area that deals with the earliest and least complex sound processing.
This tells the researchers that being engaged with a task
actually helps the brain process sounds better.
But some of that brain activity came down to all that other stuff –
reward, excitement, movement and so on.
Licking, for example, might have made areas of the brain release particular chemicals
that gear up auditory neurons for listening.
Basically, the researchers say that based on all the different kinds of patterns they found,
actively listening to sound is a really complicated process!
The next step is to discover more about how these different groups of neurons affect listening.
And who knows, it might just help us figure out how to tune in better in class.
Thanks for watching to this episode of SciShow News,
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