Conserved pathway activation following xenogeneic, heterotypic fusion

What is it about?

We are learning that cells of many different types can share large amounts of their contents when they come in close contact with one another. The way that they share material can take the form of a tubular extension that joins the cytoplasm of one cell with another (termed tunneling nanotube), a packet that buds off from a cell and is then delivered to a nearby cells (termed exosome), or the complete merging of the membranes of two cells (termed fusion). We have also learned that hybrids that form spontaneously between the cells of two different species in the context of transplantation can have negative effects on human health including tumor formation and viral transfer. Thus, this study was designed to learn whether there are critical pathways that need to be activated in a cell in order to sustain hybrid formation. The study was enabled by a technique called single cell RNA-sequencing that allows one to view a snapshot of all the genes expressed in an individual cell at a given time point. The exciting finding is that certain genes are consistently expressed between hybrids and these include human growth hormone and a variety of ribosomal proteins. This finding is important because the more we understand about how hybrids form between species, the higher the likelihood that we can prevent it.

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