BREAKING FREE: When a chromosomally unstable cell divides, its chromosomes can become disordered during anaphase (1). Errors in segregation can allow chromosomes to leak into the cytosol, where they form “micronuclei” (2), which trigger an inflammatory response in the daughter cell (3). This response can lead to metastasis.
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The paper S.F. Bakhoum et al., “Chromosomal instability drives metastasis through a cytosolic DNA response,” Nature, 553:467-72, 2018. Aneuploidy—the presence of abnormal numbers of chromosomes in a cell—is associated with cancer metastasis, but scientists have struggled to connect the mechanistic dots underlying the phenomenon. To explore the association, a team of researchers led by Lewis Cantley, a cancer biologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, and Sam Bakhoum, a radiation oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, recently injected chromosomally unstable breast and lung cancer cells into mice, and saw that the cells were more likely to metastasize than cells in which chromosomal instability was suppressed. To the researchers’ surprise, they also observed a heightened inflammatory response in the chromosomally unstable cells even before they were injected ...
