Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

 

Thus Neil Sedaka, the American pop songster back in the 60s. He was crooning about hearts of course but since then we’ve discovered that for our genetic hearts — our DNA — breaking up is not that tough and indeed it’s quite common.

A moving picture worth a thousand words

When I’m trying to explain cancer to non-scientists I often begin by showing a short movie of a cell in the final stages of dividing to form two identical daughter cells. This is the process called mitosis and the end-game is the exciting bit because the cell’s genetic material, its DNA, has been duplicated and the two identical sets of chromosomes are lined up in the middle of the cell. There ensues a mighty tug-of-war as cables (strands of proteins) are attached to the chromosomes to rip them apart, providing a separate genome for each new cell when, shortly after, the parent cell splits into two. When viewed as a speeded-up movie it’s incredibly dramatic and violent — which is why I show it because it’s easy to see how things could go wrong to create broken chromosomes or an unequal division of chromosomes (aneuploidy). It’s the flip side if you like to the single base changes (mutations) — the smallest damage DNA can suffer — that are a common feature of cancers.

In Heir of the Dog we showed pictures of normal and cancerous chromosomes that had been tagged with coloured markers to illustrate the quite staggering extent of “chromosome shuffling” that can occur.

Nothing new there

We’ve known about aneuploidy for a long time. Over 20 years ago Bert Vogelstein and his colleagues showed that the cells in most bowel cancers have different numbers of chromosomes and we know now that chromosomal instability is present in most solid tumours (90%).

Knowing it happens is one thing: being able to track it in real time to see how it happens is another. This difficulty has recently been overcome by Ana C. F. Bolhaqueiro and her colleagues from the Universities of Utrecht and Groningen who took human colorectal tumour cells and grew them in a cell culture system in the laboratory that permits 3D growth — giving rise to clumps of cells called organoids.

Scheme representing how cells grown as a 3D clump (organoid) can be sampled to follow chromosomal changes. Cells were taken from human colon tumours and from adjacent normal tissue and grown in dishes. The cells were labelled with a fluorescent tag to enable individual chromosomes to been seen by microscopy as the cells divided. At time intervals single cells were selected and sequenced to track changes in DNA. From Johnson and McClelland 2019.

Genetic evolution in real time

As the above scheme shows, the idea of organoids is that their cells grow and divide so that at any time you can select a sample and look at what’s happening to its DNA. Furthermore the DNA can be sequenced to pinpoint precisely the genetic changes that have occurred.

It turned out that cancer cells often make mistakes in apportioning DNA between daughter cells whereas such errors are rare in normal, healthy cells.

It should be said that whilst these errors are common in human colon cancers, a subset of these tumours do not show chromosomal instability but rather have a high frequency of small mutations (called microsatellite instability). Another example of how in cancer there’s usually more than one way of getting to the same end.

Building bridges …

The most common type of gross chromosomal abnormality occurs when chromosomes fuse via their sticky ends to give what are called chromatin bridges (chromatin just means DNA complete with all the proteins normally attached to it). Other errors can give rise to a chromosome that’s become isolated — called a lagging chromosome, it’s a bit like a sheep that has wandered off from the rest of the flock. As the cell finally divides and the daughter cells move apart, DNA bridges undergo random fragmentation.

… but where to …

Little is known about how cells deal with aneuploidy and the extent to which it drives tumour development. This study showed that variation in chromosome number depends on the rate at which chromosomal instability develops and the capacity of a cell to survive in the face of changes in chromosome number. More generally for the future, it shows that the organoid approach offers an intriguing opening for exploring this facet of cancer.

Reference

Bolhaqueiro, A.C.F. et al. (2019). Ongoing chromosomal instability and karyotype evolution in human colorectal cancer organoids. Nature Genetics 51, 824–834.

Lengauer, C. et al., (1997). Genetic instability in colorectal cancers. Nature 386, 623-627.

Johnson, S.C. and McClelland, S.E. (2019). Watching cancer cells evolve. Nature 570, 166-167.

I Know What I Like

 

I guess most of us at some time or other will have stood gazing at a painting for a while before muttering ‘Wow, that’s awesome’ or words to that effect if we’re not into the modern argot. Some combination of subject, style and colour has turned our crank and left us thinking we wouldn’t mind having that on our kitchen wall.

Given the thousands of years of man’s daubing and the zillions of forms that have appeared from pre-historic cave paintings through Eastern painting, the Italian Renaissance, Impressionism, Dadaism and the rest to Pop Art, it’s amazing that everyone isn’t a fanatic for one sort or another. The sane might say the field’s given itself a bad name by passing off tins of baked beans, stuff thrown at a canvas and unmade beds as ‘art’ but, even so, it seems odd that it remains a minority obsession.

Can science help?

Science is wonderful, as we all know, but the notion that it might arouse the collective artistic lust seems fanciful. Nevertheless, unnoticed by practically everyone, our vast smorgasbord of smears has been surreptitiously joined over the last 30 years by a new form: an ever-expanding avalanche of pics created by biologists trying to pin down how animals work at the molecular level. The crucial technical development has been the application of fluorescence in the life sciences: flags that glow when you shine light on them and can be stuck on to molecules to track what goes on in cells and tissues. The pioneer of this field was Roger Tsien who died, aged 64, in 2016.

Because this has totally transformed cell biology we’ve run into lots of brilliant examples in these pages — recently in Shifting the Genetic Furniture, in Caveat Emptor and John Sulston: Biologist, Geneticist and Guardian of our Heritage and in the use of red and green tags for picking out individual types of proteins that mark mini-cells within cells in Lorenzo’s Oil for Nervous Breakdowns.

To mark the New Year this piece looks at science from a different angle by focussing not on the scientific story but on the beauty that has become a by-product of this pursuit of knowledge.

Step this way: entrance free

So let’s take a stroll through our science gallery and gaze at just a few, randomly selected works of art.

1. Cells grown in culture:

This was one of the first experiments in my laboratory using fluorescently labelled antibodies, carried out by a student, Emily Hayes, so long ago that she now has a Ph.D., a husband and two children. The cells are endothelial cells (that line blood vessels). Blue: nuclei; green: F-actin; red: Von Willebrand factor, a protein marker for endothelium.

 

2. Two very recent images taken by my colleague Roderik Kortlever of a senescent mouse fibroblast and of mouse breast tissue:

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Waves of calcium in firing neurons:

One of my fondest memories is helping to do the first experiment that measured the level of calcium within a cell, carried out with my colleague the late Roger Tsien and two other friends. I only grew the cells: Roger had designed and made the molecule, quin2. We didn’t know it at the time but Roger’s wonder molecule was the first of many intracellular ‘reporters.’ Roger shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein with organic chemist Osamu Shimomura and neurobiologist Martin Chalfie.

This wonderful video of a descendant of quin2 in nerve cells was made in Dr. Sakaguchi’s lab at Iowa State University.

 

4. Calcium wave flooding a fertilized egg: Taro Kaneuchi and colleagues at the Tokyo Metropolitan University:

Click for a time-lapse movie of an egg cell that has been artificially stimulated to show the kind of calcium change that happens at fertilization. In this time-lapse movie the calcium level reaches a maximum signal intensity after about 30 min before gradually decreasing to the basal level.

 

5. The restless cell (1):

This movie shows how protein filaments in cells can continuously break down and reform – called treadmilling. Visualised in HeLa cells using a green fluorescent protein that sticks to microtubules (tubular polymers made up of the protein tubulin) by HAMAMATSU PHOTONICS.

 

6. The restless cell (2):

This movie shows how mitochondria (organelles within the cell) are continuously changing shape and moving within the cell’s interior (cytosol). Red marks the mitochondria; green DNA within the nucleus. HAMAMATSU PHOTONICS.

 

7. Cell division:

Pig kidney cells undergoing mitosis. Red marks DNA (nucleus); green is tubulin: HAMAMATSU PHOTONICS.

 

8. DNA portrait of Sir John Sulston by Marc Quinn commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery:This image looks a bit drab in the present context but in some ways it’s the most dramatic of all. John Sulston shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz for working out the cell lineage of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (i.e. how it develops from a single, fertilized egg to an adult). He went on to sequence the entire DNA of C. elegans. Published in 1998, it was the first complete genome sequence of an animal — an important proof-of-principle for the Human Genome Project that followed and for which Sulston directed the British contribution at the Sanger Centre in Cambridgeshire, England. The project was completed in 2003.

The portrait shows colonies of bacteria in a jelly that, together, carry all Sulston’s DNA. This represents DNA cloning in which DNA fragments, taken up by bacteria after insertion into a circular piece of DNA (a plasmid), are multiplied to give many identical copies for sequencing.

 

9. “Brainbow” mice by Tamily Weissman at Harvard University:

The science behind this astonishing image builds on the work of Roger Tsien. Mice are genetically engineered to carry three different fluorescent proteins corresponding to the primary colours red, yellow and blue. Within each cell recombination occurs randomly, giving rise to different colours. The principle of mixing primary colours is the same as used in colour televisions.  In this view individual neurons in the brain (specifically a layer of the hippocampus) project their dendrites into the outer layer. Other magnificent pictures can be seen in the Cell Picture Show.

It’s certainly science – but is it art?

A few years ago the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge staged Vermeer’s Women, an exhibition of key works by Johannes Vermeer and over thirty other masterpieces from the Dutch ‘Golden Age’. I tried the experiment of standing in the middle of each room and picking out the one painting that, from a distance, most caught my amateur eye. Funny thing was: not one turned out to be by the eponymous star of the show! Wondrous though Vermeer’s paintings were, the ones that really took my fancy were by Pieter de Hooch, Samuel van Hoogstraten and Nicolaes Maes, guys I’d never heard of.

Which made the point that you don’t need to be a big cheese to make a splash and that in the new Dutch Republic of the 17th century, the most prosperous nation in Europe, there was enough money to keep a small army of splodgers in palettes and paint. Skillful and incredibly patient though these chaps were, they simply used the tools available to paint what they saw in the world before them — as for the most part have artists down the ages.

But hang on! Isn’t that what we’ve just been on about? Scientists applying enormous skill and patience in using the tools they’ve developed to visualize life — to image what Nature lays before them. So the only difference between the considerable army of biological scientists around the world making a new art form and the Old Masters is that the newcomers are unveiling life — as opposed to the immortalizing a rather dopy-looking aristocrat learning to play the virginal or some-such.

Controversial?

Not really. Let’s leave the last word to Roger Tsien. In our final picture there are eight bacterial colonies each expressing a different colour of fluorescent protein arranged to grow as a San Diego beach scene in a Petri dish. It became the logo of Roger’s laboratory.

Bonkers Really … but …

 

This is just in case you spotted the headline in January 2018: ‘Scientists Counted All The Protein Molecules in a Cell And The Answer Really Is 42. This is so perfect.’ 

Them scientists eh! The things they get up to!! The scallywags in this case were Brandon Ho & chums from the University of Toronto and Signe Dean, the journalist who came up with the headline, was referring, of course, to Douglas Adams’s “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life …” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — though it may be noted that Ho’s paper includes neither the number 42 nor mention of Douglas Adams.

The cult that has evolved around this number is both amusing and bizarre, not least because Adams himself explained that he dreamed 42 up out of the blue. In a different context a while ago (talking about how the way you get to work might affect your life expectancy) I recounted happy evenings spent carousing in The Baron (well, having a quiet jar or two) with Douglas Adams and friends from which it was clear that he was not into abstruse mathematics, astrology or the occult. He just had a vivid imagination.

Anything for a catchy headline but

Aside from the whimsy, is there anything interesting in this paper? Well, yes. Ho & Co studied a type of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) that is mighty important because it’s been a foundation for brewing and baking since ancient times. So no merry sessions in The Baron of Beef without it! Its cells are about the same size as red blood cells (5–10 microns in diameter) but you can actually see them sometimes as films on the skin of fruit. It’s played a huge role in biology as a ‘model organism’ for studying how we work because the proteins it makes that are essential for life are pretty well identical to those in human cells — so much so that you can swap those that control cell growth and division between the two. Yeast proteins work just fine in human cells and vice versa.

 

Yeast on the skin of a grape. Photo: Barbara W. Beacham

 

The question Ho & Co asked was ‘how many protein molecules are there in one cell?’ In the age when you can sequence the DNA of practically anything at the drop of a hat, you might think we’d know the answer already but in fact it’s not been at all clear. Accordingly, what these authors did was to pull together all the relevant studies that have been done to come up with an absolute figure. The answer that emerged was that the number of protein molecules per yeast cell is 4.2 x 10⁷ — which, of course, can also be written as 42 million. Eureka! We have our headline!! Albeit, as the authors noted, with a two-fold error range.

Does anyone care?

Now you’re just being awkward. You should be grateful to be made to picture for a moment tens of millions of proteins jiggling around in little sacs so small you could get tens of thousands of these cells on the head of a pin. And somehow, in that heaving molecular city, each protein manages to carry out its own task so that the cell works. It is quite staggering.

Mention of tasks leads to the other question Ho et al looked at: how many copies are there of the different types of protein? We know from its DNA sequence that this yeast has about 6,000 genes (Saccharomyces Genome Database). So that’s at least 6,000 different proteins. Not surprisingly, it turns out that about two thirds of them are in the middle in terms of abundance — i.e. there’s between 1,000 and 10,000 molecules of each sort per cell. The rest are either low abundance (up to about 800 molecules per cell) or at the high end — 140,000 to 750,000, i.e. somewhere in the region of half a million copies of each type of protein.

Does this distribution make sense in terms of what these proteins do?

You know the answer because if it didn’t the Toronto team wouldn’t have got their work published but, indeed, proteins present in large numbers are, for example, part of the machinery that makes new proteins (so they’re slaving away all the time) whereas, those present in small numbers do things like repair and replicate DNA and drive cells to divide — important jobs but ones that are only intermittently needed.

These results aren’t going to turn science on its head but it is awe-inspiring when a piece of work really brings us face-to-face with stunning complexity of biology. And if it takes a bonkers headline to catch our eye, so be it!

Reference

Ho, B. et al. (2018). Unification of Protein Abundance Datasets Yields a Quantitative Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteome. Cell Systems. Published online: January 23, 2018.

Holiday Reading (3) – Stopping the Juggernaut

The mutations that drive cancers fall into two major groups: those that reduce or eliminate the activity of affected proteins and those that have the opposite effect and render the protein abnormally active. It’s intuitively easy to see how the latter work: if a protein (or more than one) in a pathway that tells cells to proliferate becomes more efficient the process is accelerated. Less obvious is how losing an activity might have a similar effect but this comes about because the process by which one cell becomes two (called the cell cycle) is controlled by both positive and negative factors (accelerators and brakes if you will). This concept of a balancing act – signals pulling in opposite directions – is a common theme in biology. In the complex and ever changing environment of a cell the pressure to reproduce is balanced by cues that ask crucial questions. Are there sufficient nutrients available to support growth? Is the DNA undamaged, i.e. in a fit state to be replicated? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’ the cell cycle machinery applies the brakes, so that operations are suspended until circumstances change. The loss of negative regulators releases a critical restraint so that cells have a green light to divide even when they should not – a recipe for cancer.

The cell cycle.

Cells are stimulated by growth factors to leave a quiescent state (G₀) and enter the cell cycle – two growth phases (G₁ & G₂), S phase where DNA is duplicated and mitosis (M) in which the cells divide to give to identical daughter cells. Checkpoints can arrest progression if, for example, DNA is damaged. 

We’re all familiar with this kind of message tug-of-war at the level of the whole animal. We’ve eaten a cream cake and the schoolboy within is saying ‘go on, have another’ whilst the voice of wisdom is whispering ‘if you go on for long enough you’ll end up spherical.’

Because loss of key negative regulators occurs in almost all cancers it is a high priority to find ways of replacing inactivated or lost genes. Thus far, however, successful ‘gene therapy’ approaches have not been forthcoming with perhaps the exception of the emerging field of immunotherapy. The aim here is to boost the activity of the immune system of an individual – in other words to give an innate anti-cancer defense a helping hand. The immune system can affect solid cancers through what’s become known as the tumour microenvironment – the variety of cells and messengers that flock to the site of the abnormal growth. We’ve referred to these as ‘groupies’ and they include white blood cells. They’re drawn to the scene of the crime by chemical signals released by the tumour – the initial aim being to liquidate the intruder (i.e. tumour cells). However, if this fails, a two-way communication sees would-be killers converted to avid supporters that are essential for cancer development and spread.

The tumour microenvironment. Tumour cells release chemical messengers that attract other types of cell, in particular those that mediate the immune response. If the cancer cells are not eliminated a two-way signaling system is established that helps tumour development.

There is much optimism that this will evolve into a really effective therapy but it is too early for unreserved confidence.

The obstacle of reversing mutations that eliminate the function of a gene has led to the current position in which practically all anti-cancer agents in use are inhibitors, that is, they block the activity of a protein (or proteins) resulting in the arrest of cell proliferation – which may ultimately lead to cell death. Almost all these drugs are not specific for tumour cells: they hit some component of the cell replication machinery and will block division in any cell they reach – which is why so many give rise to the side-effects notoriously associated with cancer chemotherapy. For example, the taxanes – widely used in this context – stick to protein cables to prevent them from pulling duplicated DNA strands apart so that cells, in effect, become frozen in final stages of division. Other classes of agent target different aspects of the cell cycle.

It is somewhat surprising that non-tumour specific agents work as well as they do but their obvious shortcomings have provided a major incentive for the development of ‘specific’ drugs – meaning ones that hit only tumour cells and leave normal tissue alone. Several of these have come into use over the past 15 years and more are in various stages of clinical trials. They’re specific because they knock out the activity of mutant proteins that are made only in tumour cells. Notable examples are Zelboraf^® manufactured by Roche (hits the mutated form of a cell messenger – called BRAF – that drives a high proportion of malignant melanomas) and Gleevec^® (Novartis AG: blocks a hybrid protein – BCR-ABL – that is usually formed in a type of leukemia).

These ‘targeted therapies’ are designed to not so much to poke the blancmange as to zap it by knocking out the activity of critical mutant proteins that are the product of cancer evolution. And they have produced spectacular remissions. However, in common with all other anti-cancer drugs, they suffer from the shortcoming that, almost inevitably, tumours develop resistance to their effects and the disease re-surfaces. The most remarkable and distressing aspect of drug resistance is that it commonly occurs on a timescale of months.

And being outwitted

Tumour cells use two tactics to neutralize anything thrown at them before it can neutralize them. One is to treat the agent as garbage and activate proteins in the cell membrane that pump it out. That’s pretty smart but what’s really staggering is the flexibility cells show in adapting their signal pathways to counter the effect of a drug blocking a specific target. Just about any feat of molecular gymnastics that you can imagine has been shown to occur, ranging from switching to other pathways in the signalling network to short-circuit the block, to evolving secondary mutations in the target mutant protein so that the drug can no longer stick to it. Launching specific drugs at cells may give them a mighty poke in a particularly tender spot, and indeed many cells may die as a result, but almost inevitably some survive. The blancmange shakes itself, comes up with a counter and gets down to business again. This quite extraordinary resilience of tumour cells derives from the infinite adaptability of the genome and we might do well to reflect that in trying to come up with anti-cancer drugs we are taking on an adversary that has overcome the challenges involved in generating the umpteen million species to have emerged during the earth’s lifetime.

Not the least disheartening aspect of this scenario is that when tumours recur after an initial drug treatment they are often more efficient at propagating themselves, i.e. more aggressive, than their precursors.