Cancer Hallmarks and Promiscuous Cell State Plasticity
In an earlier Cancer Ecology Commentary post from April, Andrew Fineberg and colleagues described how lineage plasticity, the ability of cells to adopt a range of phenotypic states needed for organ development and injury repair was at the same time providing an additional pathway for neoplastic initiation and development. The epigenome, the set of DNA and chromatin modifications controlling coordinated expression of gene networks was highlighted given its role in determining a cell’s phenotypic state. That regulatory control, however, was subject to stochasticity, random variability and uncertainty, an inevitable consequence of information transfer. Fineberg’s team, relying on increasingly refined laboratory means of measuring the probability of a cell’s transcriptional state at the single cell level took advantage of an inverse relationship from statistical thermodynamics between the probability of being in a particular state and its (quasi-) potential energy. This permitted ...