bidiboom Posted July 8, 2011 Report Share Posted July 8, 2011 Hi everyone, I have had a questionmark about a point in my mind for a long time : While its hard for even a procaryotic bacterium to pass blood-brain barrier (to me, because of tight junctions between endothelial cells), how is it possible to pass it for a eucaryotic cancer cell and metastasize to the brain? If you enlighten me about it, I will be Thank you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EoE Posted July 8, 2011 Report Share Posted July 8, 2011 Warning: I am not a cancer biologist. Based on an educated guess and some quick reading, the mechanism is: the cancer cells are able to attach to the endothelium, unzip the intracellular zipper and squeeze through. This has to do with the cancer cells having what amounts to half a zipper all over their surface. They unzip the zipper between the endothelial cells and zip themselves into the space. Then they rezip the zipper as they pass through. Beautiful! Leukocytes are capable of doing this by the same mechanism, crossing the BBB with ease. The reason microbes cannot do this is that they don't have the zipper molecules on their surface (in fact, they have stuff on their surface that will make the endothelial cells very angry). Here are two articles with sections that would be good (I love Nature Reviews, there should be a Nature Reviews Med School Admissions journal): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21472002 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21365651 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bidiboom Posted July 8, 2011 Author Report Share Posted July 8, 2011 Thank you EoE.. in a CD of a book about cell molecular biology I have watched a photomicrographed film of a piece of scarred tissue, and yes:) it was really beautiful, even exciting.. the leukocyte was passing through the endothelial cells just like tooth paste coming out of tube. So there is no protective role of BBB on metastasis. Thank you for the links as well.. lets read them:) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bidiboom Posted July 9, 2011 Author Report Share Posted July 9, 2011 Cancer cells(the ones which can) are damaging the tight junctions and once they open a path, it becomes easier for the other cancer cells coming after.. what a plague this cancer is! its not only proliferating in itself, but also producing enzymes, getting free of extracellular matrix, promoting angiogenensis.. as if well organized.. sometimes it becomes hard to believe that those all occur coincidentially.. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020758 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thebouque Posted July 12, 2011 Report Share Posted July 12, 2011 it's actually very disorganized Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.