【科学美国人】新的解读方式，还不来看看？BIOLOGY Divide or Conquer

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Cancer can’t proliferate and invade at the same time

The worst cancer cells don’t sit still. Insteadthey metastasize—migrate from their original sites and establish new tumors in other parts of the body. Once a cancer spreads, it is harder to eliminate. A study by develop-mental biologists offers a fresh clue to how cancer cells acquire the ability to invade other tissues a prerequisite for metastasis. It reveals that invasion requires cells to stop dividing. Therefore, the two processes invasion and proliferation are mutually exclusive. The finding could inform cancer the rapies, which typically target rapidly pro-liferating cancer cells.

David Matus of Stony Brook University and David Sherwood of Duke University turned to a transparent worm to elucidate this invading process. During the worm’s normal development, a cell known as the anchor cell breaks through a structure called the basement membrane, which initially separates the uterus from the vulva. The process is similar to how human cancer cells invade basement membranes to enter the bloodstream, which carries them to distant sites. So biologists have adoptedCaenorhabditis elegans as a metastasis modelorganism, which they can easily image and genetically manipulate.

After turning on and off hundreds of genes in C. elegans,Matus’s team found a gene that regulated anchor cell invasion.

When it was turned off, the anchor cell failedto invade the basement membrane. But the anchor cell also did something unexpected: it began to divide. Conversely, when the researchers inhibited cell proliferation, the anchor cell stopped dividing and began to invade again. Further experiments showed that halting cell division was both necessary and sufficient for invasion. Although anec-dotal observations by pathologists have sug-gested this either/or situation might be the case, the new study is the first to uncover the genetic mechanism that explains why these two processes must be mutually exclusive. The results were published in October in the journal Developmental Cell.

The study also explains the long-stand-ing but mysterious observation by cancer biologists that the invading front of many tumors does not contain dividing cells; instead the invasive cells lead the dividing cells behind them and push forward into healthy tissue as the tumor grows in size. “This research changes how we think about cancer at some level,” Matus says. “We think of cancer as a disease of uncontrolled cell division, and in fact, many cancer drugs are designed to target these dividing cells. But our study suggests that we need to figure out how to target these nondividing cells, too, as these are the ones that are invasive.”

Before the insight makes its way into cancer treatments, however, it will need further testing. “Now we can take that simple model and go to more complex systems like breast cancer tumors,” says Andrew Ewald, a cancer cell biologist at Johns Hop kins University. Metastatic breast cancer alone accounts for about 40,000 deaths every year in the U.S., but the five-year survival rate is nearly 100 percent if caught before the cancer spreads. —Viviane Callier

文章生词及固定短语：

1.cancer cells 癌细胞

2.metastasize[mə'tæstəsaiz]

vi.【病理学】(癌细胞)转移变形：

vi.metastasized.metastasizing 衍生短语：Tumor growth and metastasize 肿瘤生长和转移 这个词着重指身体疾病的细胞迁移等等，至于人口的“迁移”，大家应该知道是：migrate这个词既可以是动物的迁徙，也可以用在人口的迁移，大家都知道美洲大部分都是移民，顺便说一下“移民”即：immigrant

3.original state 原状；初始状态

4.prerequisite n. 先决条件 adj. 首要必备的

5.proliferationn. 增殖，扩散；分芽繁殖

衍生短语：cellular proliferation 细胞增殖 ; 细胞增生 另外大家还有印象吗？有一个词也是“繁殖”的意思，没错，就是“reproduction”

6.elucidate vt. 阐明；说明 ==clarify

7.membrane n. 膜；薄膜；羊皮纸

8.separate...from... 把......分开，把......隔离开......，另外还有一个短语与它同义，不知道大家有没有印象呢？那就是“divide...with...”

9.bloodstream n. [生理] 血流，血液的流动

10.Caenorhabditis elegans 【专有名词】秀丽隐杆线虫

11.nondividing cells 不分裂细胞 nondividing adj;不分裂的，未发生分裂现象的

12.complex systems 复杂系统，复合系统

13.breast cancer 乳腺癌

14.survival rate 【生物】存活率

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