201

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Issue 201: The artwork represents our recent study on population dynamics of Epithelial-Mesenchymal heterogeneity in cancer cells. Our in-silico model considers the asymmetric distribution of the EMT-inducing transcription factor SNAIL during cell division to cause spontaneous phenotypic switching. Generating a single clone from a mesenchymal cell (top left bar-plot) leads to a heterogeneous (Epithelial, Hybrid, and Mesenchymal) population over one in-silico cell passage (top right bar-plot). Upon several such passages (bottom row), the cell population converges to an Epithelial dominated phenotypic distribution. Our results suggest asymmetric cell division as a mechanism that can explain some of the findings reported in PMC42-LA breast cancer cells (click here).