Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 112, Issue 7, Pages 2287-2292Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1410776112
Keywords
heterogeneity; cell sorting; differential adhesion; mammary; prostate
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) Bay Area Physical Sciences and Oncology Center
- Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program [W81XWH-10-1-1023, W81XWH-13-1-0221]
- NIH common funds [DP5 OD012194-03, DP2 HD080351-01]
- Sidney Kimmel Foundation
- University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Program in Breakthrough Biomedical Research
- UCSF Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology (National Institute of General Medical Sciences Systems Biology Center Grant) [P50 GM081879]
- US Department of Defense through a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship
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Developing tissues contain motile populations of cells that can self-organize into spatially ordered tissues based on differences in their interfacial surface energies. However, it is unclear how self-organization by this mechanism remains robust when interfacial energies become heterogeneous in either time or space. The ducts and acini of the human mammary gland are prototypical heterogeneous and dynamic tissues comprising two concentrically arranged cell types. To investigate the consequences of cellular heterogeneity and plasticity on cell positioning in the mammary gland, we reconstituted its self-organization from aggregates of primary cells in vitro. We find that self-organization is dominated by the interfacial energy of the tissue-ECM boundary, rather than by differential homo- and heterotypic energies of cell-cell interaction. Surprisingly, interactions with the tissue-ECM boundary are binary, in that only one cell type interacts appreciably with the boundary. Using mathematical modeling and cell-type-specific knockdown of key regulators of cell-cell cohesion, we show that this strategy of self-organization is robust to severe perturbations affecting cell-cell contact formation. We also find that this mechanism of self-organization is conserved in the human prostate. Therefore, a binary interfacial interaction with the tissue boundary provides a flexible and generalizable strategy for forming and maintaining the structure of two-component tissues that exhibit abundant heterogeneity and plasticity. Our model also predicts that mutations affecting binary cell-ECM interactions are catastrophic and could contribute to loss of tissue architecture in diseases such as breast cancer.
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