Rogue Reprogramming

A team of builders arriving to fix a problem is great, but if repeatedly summoned to rebuild walls and erect needless structures they’d soon do more harm than good. This appears to be what Helicobacter pyloriinfection does in the stomach, activating a repair mechanism and creating potentially precancerous changes. Infection activates YAP, a protein that prompts stomach lining cells to adopt a foetal-like, rapidly multiplying state, as they might during injury. Researchers identified the chain of signals responsible: immune cells release an inflammatory molecule called IL-1β, which stimulates neighbouring support cells to produce another signal that activates YAP. Interrupting this chain reduced YAP activation (red in the pictured lab-grown stomach lining tissue, green. Low in untreated tissue (left), increased when IL-1β is added (centre), and reduced when part of the IL-1β signalling cascade is blocked (right)), which may point to a new target for treatment.

Image made using Leica Microsystems microscopy

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Giulia Beccaceci and colleagues
• Department of Hepatology and Gastroenterology, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, September 2026