Contradictory Cancer

Every cell in your body is bustling with life. Millions of events occur every second to keep them functioning normally. Cancer throws a spanner in the works, causing cells to go rogue as a result of faults in their genes. Gliomas are a cancer of the brain or spinal cord. They’re thought to arise from stem cells in the nervous system, which have become mutant. As mutations in a gene called IDH1 are particularly common in gliomas, researchers investigated neural stem cells for this fault. Normal neural stem cells (pictured) mature into cells called glia (red) and neurons (green). But neural stem cells containing mutant IDH1 fail to mature – a characteristic often seen in cancer cells. However these mutant cells also died easily, which doesn’t fit the bill of a gene that causes cancer. More research is therefore needed to unpick this enigma.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Kamila Rosiak and colleagues
• Department of Tumor Biology, Medical University of Lodz, Poland
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS One, May 2016