Sayak Banerjee, Amity University Kolkata
Immunotherapy, although being a formidable cancer treatment, produces durable responses for a few tumor types only. Lately, scientists have identified 182 genes that enable the cancer cells to evade death by the immune system.
They carried out genome-wide CRISPR screens across a group of genetically varying mouse cancer cell lines, cultured in the presence of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs), to distinguish a phenotypically strong set of genes that allow the malignant cells to avoid killing mediated by CTLs.
Those malignant cells were placed beside the T cells devised to manipulate them. Then CRISPR was used by the researchers to kill every gene individually in the cancer cells and the resulting deviation was calculated. Thus, a key set of 182 genes had been identified which increased either the resistance or the sensitivity of the cancer cells to CLT-mediated toxicity.
Additionally, the scientists also demonstrated how the pleiotropic effects of autophagy control cancer-cell-intrinsic evasion of death by CTLs and the significance of these effects in the tumor microenvironment and metastasis.
Source: Lawson, K.A., Sousa, C.M., Zhang, X. et al. Functional genomic landscape of cancer-intrinsic evasion of killing by T cells. Nature (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2746-2 , https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2746-2
Butterflies need cool shades to survive!
Richismita Hazra, Amity University Kolkata Climatic variations affect the abundance, spread, and phenology of species. Removal of microclimates that the butterflies need to survive, along with drastic climatic variations has led to extreme weather alterations and temperature fluctuations. This has affected the survival of butterflies that are ectotherms and hence dependent on external sources of […]