#spheroids

Ocean Jasper - cube cut from the first vein

Ocean Jasper, also known as orbicular jasper, is a variety of quartz. It has fibrous spherulites formed as a result of extensive alteration and silification of former tuffs. These structures tend to have radial growth from central points which give the stone circular orbicular patternings. It comes in many colors and spherical patterns, and its hardness on the Mohs scale is 7. It is found in northwestern Madagascar in the Analalava district. There are several known veins, each with unique attributes. The original first vein is located near the village of Marovato, having similar patterns to the eighth vein, which is nearly tapped-out.

Below are some polished slabs and spheroids cut from the eighth vein.

In the Round

Molecular and physical differences revealed between breast cancer cells lab-grown on a flat surface in 2D versus in 3D as spheroids – the nucleus of the 3D-grown cells is more rounded, has a larger surface, a more compact chromatin [DNA packaged with proteins in the nucleus] and a distinctive set of downregulated genes

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Julieta Ramirez Cuellar and Roberto Ferrari, and colleagues

Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona Institute for Science and Technology (BIST), Barcelona, Spain

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in EMBO Journal, April 2024

Stem the Flow

If you snip just the sprouting head off an invasive weed in your garden, it’ll grow back with a vengeance. Countering cancer can be the same, because of cancer stem cells: resistant, hard to spot cells with the potential to flourish into fresh tumours. These are a major target for anti-cancer drugs, but occur in small numbers so are hard to find and tackle. Researchers have now made a gel, composed of a network of chemicals and water, that encourages cancer cells to revert back to these stem cells. Cancer cells placed on the gel formed spherical structures (video, brain cancer cells) and produced molecules associated with cancer stem cells. The study then looked at this population of stem cells, identifying their properties and trialling new treatments, suggesting the gel could be used to help develop personalised treatments for particular cancers, and cut cancer off at the root.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Video from work by Jun Suzuka and colleagues

Department of Cancer Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

Video copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, March 2021

Use the Force

For a tumour to spread and grow, its cells must pull against the surrounding microenvironment of supporting molecules like elastic collagen. This jostling for space generates tension inside the cell – a struggle that drugs might exploit to limit cancerous growth. To investigate these forces, here researchers swap real tumours for lab-grown tumour ‘spheroids’ (black) which strain against the surrounding collagen under a microscope, creating starburst patterns of ‘deformations’ over a 12 hour period (top left to bottom right). Mathematical models simulate these patterns with the aim of predicting the contractility of different spheroids – how much their internal structure contracts when straining. Similar techniques could be used to predict the response of tumours growing in different tissue environments and provide a model for testing drugs aiming to push back on cancer.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Christophe Mark, Thomas J Grundy, Pamela L Strissel and David Böhringer, and colleagues

Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in eLife, April 2020