CAS Key Laboratory of Bio-inspired Materials and Interfacial Science, CAS Center for Excellence in Nanoscience, Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, P. R. China.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, P. R. China.
Small. 2019 Apr;15(15):e1900030. doi: 10.1002/smll.201900030. Epub 2019 Feb 10.
Self-organization is a fundamental and indispensable process in a living system. To understand cell behavior in vivo such as tumorigenesis, 3D cellular aggregates, instead of 2D cellular sheets, have been employed as a vivid in vitro model for self-organization. However, most focus on the macroscale wetting and fusion of cellular aggregates. In this study, it is reported that self-organization of cells from simple to complex aggregates can be induced by multiscale topography through confined templates at the macroscale and cell interactions at the nanoscale. On the one hand, macroscale templates are beneficial for the organization of individual cells into simple and complex cellular aggregates with various shapes. On the other hand, the realization of these macro-organizations also depends on cell interactions at the nanoscale, as demonstrated by the intimate contact between nanoscale pseudopodia stretched by adjacent frontier cells, much like holding hands and by the variation in the intermolecular interactions based on E-cadherin. Therefore, these findings may be very meaningful for clarifying the organizational mechanism of tumor development, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
自组织是生命系统中基本且不可或缺的过程。为了在体研究细胞行为，如肿瘤发生，人们采用 3D 细胞聚集体而非 2D 细胞片作为生动的体外自组织模型。然而，大多数研究集中于宏观尺度上细胞聚集体的润湿和融合。本研究表明，通过在宏观上使用受限模板和在纳米尺度上利用细胞相互作用，多尺度形貌可以诱导细胞从简单聚集体到复杂聚集体的自组织。一方面，宏观模板有利于将单个细胞组织成具有各种形状的简单和复杂细胞聚集体。另一方面，这些宏观组织的实现也依赖于纳米尺度上的细胞相互作用，如相邻前沿细胞伸展的纳米伪足的紧密接触，就像手牵手一样，以及基于 E-钙黏蛋白的分子间相互作用的变化。因此，这些发现对于阐明肿瘤发展、组织工程和再生医学的组织机制可能具有非常重要的意义。
