Yet labelling vesicles to observe them has disadvantages, including limitations to viewing in three-dimensional tissues and unforeseen effects of adding tags. Several studies implicate them in tumour growth and spread, or metastasis, so methods have been developed to tag and track these microscopic structures. You can also follow BPoD on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook science biomedicine halloween immunofluorescence programmed cell death cytoplasm cells cancer entosisĪ growing area of interest in cancer research is the role of extracellular vesicles (EVs), tiny cytoplasm packets surrounded by cell membrane, which cells secrete into the extracellular environment. Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).Laboratory of Cell Engineering, Institute of Biotechnology, Beijing, China.Image from work by Manna Wang, Zubiao Niu and Hongquan Qin, and colleagues.Learning more about the ring, and how it forms, might offer clues into slowing cancer progression, where tumour cells sometimes use entosis to consume surrounding healthy tissue. The engulfed cell usually dies, so entosis is often considered a mysterious form of programmed cell death. Scientists find this ‘mechanical ring’ is riddled with a mechanical sensor called vinculin, and expands by coordinating stretchy actomyosin in the cells’ membranes at the adherens junction – the boundary where cells touch. A bit like a snake dislocating its jaw to eat a mouse (although 2000 times smaller) the predatory cell (on the left in these pictures) opens up its cytoplasm, forming a ring shape, pictured in 3D on the top row and in cross section beneath. In this act of microscopic cannibalism, known as entosis, one human cell engulfs another.
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