Word cloud art work which shows all the proteins identified by the researchers

The environment you grow up in can have a huge influence on how you turn out. That applies to people, and to stem cells too. Now a new study has identified 60 proteins that can have a big impact on how cells react to the world around them, and how they communicate with each other.

Just as it is easier for us to move across firm ground than it is to slosh our way through a soggy, muddy field, it’s easier for stem cells to move smoothly and quickly over a solid surface than over a soft, giving surface. This is particularly true for tumor cells, which move much faster on a hard surface than any other kind.

It’s not just speed that is affected by the kind of surface you place stem cells on. For example certain stem cells placed on a hard surface will specialize and turn into bone, whereas if you place those same cells on a very soft surface they will turn into nerve cells.

The problem is we didn’t know much about why that was the case, we didn’t understand the mechanism at play that caused those cells to behave that way.

Now we do.

A team at the University of Manchester in England tackled this problem by researching integrins; these are receptors that are responsible for cell-to-cell communication, cell growth and function. Integrins are typically found at the surfaces and edges of cells and provide proteins with a convenient place to hang out when they interact with the world around them.

The researchers looked at 2400 examples of these integrin-protein clusters and, using mass spectrometry, narrowed their search down to 60 proteins that they identified as being essential in linking information from the integrins to the rest of the cellular world.

The work was published in Nature Cell Biology. In an accompanying news release Dr. Jon Humphries, one of the lead researchers, talked about the significance of the work:

“Understanding how cells sense their environment is an important step in understanding how, for example, cancer cells move or how stem cells take on different jobs.”

His colleague, Professor Martin Humphries, says understanding how cells sense where they are and how to behave gives us new insights into how we can use that knowledge to better control their movement:

“Our findings on how cells sense their environment have unlocked an important key to understanding how we can persuade cells to form different tissues and how we might stop cell movement in diseases such as cancer.”