Maheden Kieran, Zhang Vivian Weixuan, Shakiba Nika
School of Biomedical Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Front Cell Dev Biol. 2022 May 11;10:891569. doi: 10.3389/fcell.2022.891569. eCollection 2022.
Stem cells experience many selective pressures which shape their cellular populations, potentially pushing them to skew towards dominance of a few break-through clones. An evolutionarily conserved answer to curb these aberrant selective pressures is cell competition, the elimination of a subset of cells by their neighbours in a seemingly homogenous population. Cell competition in mammalian systems is a relatively recent discovery that has now been observed across many tissue systems, such as embryonic, haematopoietic, intestinal, and epithelial compartments. With this rapidly growing field, there is a need to revisit and standardize the terminology used, much of which has been co-opted from evolutionary biology. Further, the implications of cell competition across biological scales in organisms have been difficult to capture. In this review, we make three key points. One, we propose new nomenclature to standardize concepts across dispersed studies of different types of competition, each of which currently use the same terminology to describe different phenomena. Second, we highlight the challenges in capturing information flow across biological scales. Third, we challenge the field to incorporate next generation technologies into the cell competition toolkit to bridge these gaps. As the field of cell competition matures, synergy between cutting edge tools will help elucidate the molecular events which shape cellular growth and death dynamics, allowing a deeper examination of this evolutionarily conserved mechanism at the core of multicellularity.
干细胞经历许多选择压力，这些压力塑造了它们的细胞群体，有可能促使它们偏向少数突破性克隆的主导地位。抑制这些异常选择压力的一个进化上保守的答案是细胞竞争，即在看似同质的群体中，相邻细胞对一部分细胞的消除。哺乳动物系统中的细胞竞争是一个相对较新的发现，现在已经在许多组织系统中观察到，如胚胎、造血、肠道和上皮区室。随着这个快速发展的领域，有必要重新审视和规范所使用的术语，其中许多术语是从进化生物学中借用的。此外，细胞竞争在生物体不同生物尺度上的影响一直难以把握。在这篇综述中，我们提出三个关键点。其一，我们提出新的命名法，以规范不同类型竞争的分散研究中的概念，目前每种竞争都使用相同的术语来描述不同的现象。其二，我们强调在把握不同生物尺度上的信息流方面所面临的挑战。其三，我们向该领域提出挑战，将下一代技术纳入细胞竞争工具包以弥合这些差距。随着细胞竞争领域的成熟，前沿工具之间的协同作用将有助于阐明塑造细胞生长和死亡动态的分子事件，从而能够更深入地研究这种多细胞性核心的进化上保守的机制。
