Journal
CURRENT OPINION IN GASTROENTEROLOGY
Volume 24, Issue 1, Pages 59-63Publisher
LIPPINCOTT WILLIAMS & WILKINS
DOI: 10.1097/MOG.0b013e3282f2a2e9
Keywords
ancestral trees; clonal evolution; molecular clock; niche; stem cell
Categories
Funding
- NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE [R33CA111940] Funding Source: NIH RePORTER
- NCI NIH HHS [CA111940] Funding Source: Medline
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Purpose of review Cancer is thought to be an evolutionary process. Modern studies of evolution increasingly rely on genome comparisons, and similar molecular phylogeny approaches could be translated to somatic cell genomes to reconstruct colorectal cancer progression. The purpose of this review is to outline how human somatic cell ancestral trees can organize many old and new observations. Recent findings A somatic cell tree starts from the zygote and ends with present day normal or neoplastic cells. In between are ancestors and dead ends, which functionally correspond to Stem and nonstem cells. Cancer genome projects illustrate that mutations are relatively infrequent, and consistent with normal mutation rates, particularly if mutations begin to accumulate from birth. Therefore, some mutations eventually found in cancers may first occur in normal appearing crypts, which are maintained by niches that allow for Stem cell clonal evolution and selection. Although mutations occur too infrequently to function as somatic cell molecular clocks, potentially more labile epigenetic changes in CpG methylation may also record somatic cell ancestry. Summary Somatic cell evolution can occur throughout life, and potentially at least some of this unseen past may be reconstructed by 'reading' the lifetime changes that accumulate within our genomes.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available