Every month, wounds open in women of child-bearing age. To release an egg during ovulation, the ovary ruptures, bursting a single layer of cells known as the ovarian surface epithelium (OSE). The body quickly patches the wound, but how that repair process works is a bit of a mystery. Tissues such as intestinal crypts have distinct stem cell populations that facilitate tissue maintenance. But in the OSE, pinpointing a defined stem cell population has proven elusive.
Barbara Vanderhyden, an ovarian cancer biologist, and her team at the University of Ottawa recently found that OSE cells respond to local environmental conditions, such as tissue damage, and shift to become more epithelial or more mesenchymal and stem-like.1 The team reported in Communications Biology that stemness emerges from a variety of environmental cues, and that the ovarian epithelium may not require a distinct population of stem cells for tissue maintenance.
“It's not just ...
