细胞技术

There is now compelling evidence to show that tumors, once believed to be a homogeneous mass of abnormally proliferative cells, comprise a heterogeneous population of transformed cells resembling the hierarchically organized populations in the corresponding tissue. At the top of t ...

Cancer cells do not share equal tumor-initiating potential. Only cancer stem cells (CSCs) can initiate cancer, which is important clinically because they should be eradicated to treat cancer patients. The purpose of experimental methods for identification of CSC is to isolate CSCs among ...

Neural stem cells (NSC) self-renew and are multipotent, producing neurons and glia. Recent studies have shown that brain tumors (BT) contain cells that, like NSC, self-renew and are multipotent, producing the different types of cells found within the brain tumors. These brain tumor stem cells a ...

The brain tumor stem cell (BTSC) hypothesis is based on the premise that there is a subpopulation of cells within tumors with tumorigenic and pluripotent properties. BTSC are believed to be responsible for both the initiation of brain tumors and their resistance to current therapeutic modal ...

The cancer stem cell (CSC) theory posits that only a small population of tumor cells within the tumor has the ability to reinitiate tumor development and is responsible for tumor homeostasis and progression. Tumor initiation is a defining property of putative CSCs, which have been reported in b ...

Recent technical progress in the field of cancer stem/progenitor cell research revealed that these malignant cells may provide critical roles for primary tumor growth, metastases at distant tissues and organs, treatment resistance, and disease relapse. The precise molecular onc ...

Prostate cancer is a major health concern in the Western world. Prostate cancer stem cells have been implicated to be involved in, if not solely responsible for prostate cancer initiation and relapse after surgical, hormonal, and chemotherapy. Until now, the identity of the presumed prostate ...

Cell death by apoptosis was first identified based on morphological changes reproduced with great fidelity in cells of widely different origin when exposed to a death stimulus. These changes include condensation of the cytosol and the nuclear chromatin, blebbing of the plasma membrane, ...

Telomeres are the structures at the ends of chromosomes, composed of repetitive sequences and associated proteins, which cap chromosome ends to maintain genomic stability. These structures are maintained by the enzyme complex telomerase in germ cells and some stem cells, but are absent in ...

In spite of advances in the fields of immunohistochemistry and molecular biology, in clinical practice much of the assessment of metastases still relies on light microscopy using conventional histological stains. This is not so much a reflection of a reluctance by histopathologists to a ...

Immunocytochemistry may be defined as the identification of a cell- or tissue-bound antigen in situ, by means of a specific antibody-antigen reaction, tagged microscopically by a visible label. Successful immunocytochemistry therefore requires (1) preservation of the antigen in a ...

As described in Chapter 2 by Brooks, it has long been possible to localize antigens immunocytochemically using specific antibodies in conjunction with a label that is visible microscopically. Although much information can be derived by localizing a single protein/peptide, it is often u ...

A lectin is “a protein or glycoprotein of non-immune origin, not an enzyme, that binds to carbohydrates and agglutinates cells” (1). Lectins are naturally occurring substances, most commonly derived from plant or sometimes invertebrate sources, that can be exploited in the laboratory to de ...

Early hematogenous spread of cancer cells must be regarded as major cause for the later development of metastatic disease in patients with completely resected solid tumors, which account for the majority of cancer-related deaths in industrialized nations. Because current procedu ...

Integrins form a major family of heterodimeric cell surface receptors. Individual family members each comprise noncovalently linked, dissimilar, a- and β-subunits. Each subunit is the product of a different gene (1), and a-subunits appear to have evolved separately from β-subunits (2). S ...

Angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels from a preexisting vascular network, is a complex multistep process under the control of positive and negative factors (bi1,bi2). Growth, progression, and metastasis of malignant tumors are angiogenesis-dependent processes (3-b ...

The ability of most carcinomas to metastasize to different organs, where they grow and gradually destroy the surrounding tissues, is the feature of this disease that both increases morbidity and significantly reduces a patient's survival time. One of the ways of contributing to the predict ...

Angiogenesis describes the development of new vessels from existing blood vessels and is a crucial physiological process involved in embryo development, wound healing, and the female reproductive cycle. However, angiogenesis has also been shown to be required for tumor growth and met ...

In situ hybridization (ISH) to localize sites of expression of mRNA is widely applicable to studies of invasion and metastasis in human pathology specimens and tissues from experimental animals or cell cultures. ISH can provide crucial information about where a specific gene is expresse ...

In situ hybridization describes the annealing of a labeled nucleic acid to complementary nucleic acid sequences in a fixed target (e.g., chromosomes, free nuclei, nuclei in tissue sections, and DNA) followed by visualisation of the location of the probe. Since its development about 30 yr ago (1,2 ...