Round Them Up

You can line a group of children up in single file, but left to their own devices they’ll form an ever-morphing crowd. It’s the same with the body’s cells. In the lab it can be more manageable to grow and examine cells in a flat layer, but in the body they form 3D clusters. Researchers investigating why lung cancer cells resist targeted drug treatments examined the drug’s effect on flat layers of cells and 3D spheroid clusters. They found that in flat cultures (such as the one pictured) cells survive by activating and recruiting a protein called YAP (pink) into the cell command centre, the nucleus. In spheroids YAP remains dormant in the surrounding cytoplasm, and more of the cells die in response to the treatment. This shows the importance of spatial cell arrangement in lab experiments, and could point to some mechanisms by which tumours resist treatments.

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 Rachel Nakagawa and colleagues
• Department of Cell & Tissue Biology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife (reviewed preprint), April 2025