ReviewiScience2020
A Similar Speciation Process Relying on Cellular Stochasticity in Microbial and Cancer Cell Populations.
Review in iScience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Fraternal cooperation of hierarchical cancer parallels metazoan multicellularity and eusociality.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Metabolic adaptation pilots the differentiation of human hematopoietic cells.Life science alliance · 2024Article
- Onco-Breastomics: An Eco-Evo-Devo Holistic Approach.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- Modeling cell populations metabolism and competition under maximum power constraints.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- The paradox of cooperation among selfish cancer cells.Evolutionary applications · 2023Review
- Sea Turtles in the Cancer Risk Landscape: A Global Meta-Analysis of Fibropapillomatosis Prevalence and Associated Risk Factors.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Does Cancer Biology Rely on Parrondo's Principles?Cancers · 2021Review
- Identifying key questions in the ecology and evolution of cancer.Evolutionary applications · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Similarities between microbial and cancer cells were noticed in recent years and serve as a basis for an atavism theory of cancer. Cancer cells would rely on the reactivation of an ancestral "genetic program" that would have been repressed in metazoan cells. Here we argue that cancer cells resemble unicellular organisms mainly in their similar way to exploit cellular stochasticity to produce cell specialization and maximize proliferation. Indeed, the relationship between low stochasticity, specialization, and quiescence found in normal differentiated metazoan cells is lost in cancer. On the contrary, low stochasticity and specialization are associated with high proliferation among cancer cells, as it is observed for the "specialist" cells in microbial populations that fully exploit nutritional resources to maximize proliferation. Thus, we propose a model where the appearance of cancer phenotypes can be solely due to an adaptation and a speciation process based on initial increase in cellular stochasticity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.