Reciprocal regulatory circuits coordinating EMT plasticity

Authors:

Maren Diepenbruck1 and Gerhard Christofori1
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Affiliations:

1 Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel, 4058 Basel, Switzerland.

Keywords: 

EMT, invasion, miRNAs, metastasis, transcription factors.

Corresponding Author(s):

Gerhard Christofori, Department of Biomedicine, University of Basel, Mattenstrasse 28, 4058 Basel, Switzerland; Tel. +41 61 207 35 64; Fax. +41 61 207 35 66 gerhard.christofori@unibas.ch

Conflict of interest statement:

The authors declare no conflicts of interest

Please cite this article as:

Maren Diepenbruck and Gerhard Christofori (2017). Reciprocal regulatory circuits coordinating EMT plasticity. Cell Stress 1(3): 139-140. doi: 10.15698/cst2017.12.117

© 2017 Diepenbruck and Christofori. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.

Abstract:

Epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) as well as its reversal process, mesenchymal to epithelial transition (MET), are essential and well-controlled cellular processes during embryonic development. Tightly controlled regulatory mechanisms guide an EMT/MET plasticity and enable cells to switch forth and back between different cell morphologies and functional capabilities to endow the necessity of tissue plasticity. However, aberrant and uncontrolled activation of these processes during malignant tumor progression promotes primary tumor cell invasion, cancer cell dissemination and metastatic outgrowth. In a recent study (Nat Commun; doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-01197-w), we have reported on the post-transcriptional control of normal and cancer-associated EMT by miRNAs and identified a novel, critical double-negative feedback regulation of the thus far unknown miRNA miR1199 and the key EMT transcription factor Zeb1.