Removing Troublemakers

A few rotten apples shouldn’t ruin the whole bunch. With millions of cells in the body, it’s inevitable that some will make a misstep and need to be quietly removed. Extrusion is one method for such a dismissal, when a rogue cell is squeezed out of a layer of cells with minimal disruption to its neighbours (pictured, centre pink cell being extruded from the green embryo of a microscopic worm). A new study investigated genetic activity linked to extrusion, and revealed that the process is triggered when cells falter in the midst of DNA replication and cell division. Such errors can prompt cancer development, so removing these cells might be an intrinsic cancer-prevention technique. Further experiments in human cells revealed the involvement of a well-known cancer suppressor protein called p53, showing the body aims to cull cancerous cells before they get going.

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 Vivek K. Dwivedi and colleagues
• Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Nature, May 2021