Community effects in epithelial-mesenchymal transition

At different stages in life some cells acquire the ability to wander from one site to another through a process called epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT).

This process is essential during development because it ensures that specialised cells form tissues in the right place at the right time. EMT remains important later in life, too, for mechanisms such as wound healing and tissue remodelling. However, EMT is also linked to pathologies including fibrosis and cancer metastasis.

Here, we seek to distinguish epithelial cells from wandering mesenchymal cells and then investigate how the decision to undergo EMT is triggered.

We hypothesise that EMT can be spread to the cell’s neighbourhood and that this spread depends on a critical starting number of EMT inducing cells, which helps maintain conformity in the community.

Understanding how cells decide to migrate and how their neighbours respond to this change will give us an insight in normal developmental processes and has potential to reveal markers for metastatic cancer types and molecular targets to prevent metastasis.