Cells Talk and Help One Another via Tiny Tube Networks

Lou worried that the lines he’d noticed might be illusory, so he checked the archive of tumor specimens from patients at the cancer center. Lo and behold, the same long cellular processes were present in the tumors, too, so he set out to investigate their relevance. Since then, as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota, he’s found evidence that tumor cells use these TNTs to share molecular messages in the form of short regulatory snippets of RNA called microRNA, enabling cancer cells resistant to chemotherapy drugs to confer the same resistance on their neighbors.

How did the tunneling nanotubes go unnoticed for such a long time? Lou notes that in the last couple of decades, cancer research has centered primarily on detecting and therapeutically targeting mutations in cancer cells — and not the structures between them. “It’s right in front of our face, but if that’s not what people are focusing on, they’re going to miss it,” he said.

That’s changing now. In the last few years, the number of researchers working on TNTs and figuring out what they do has risen steeply. Research teams have discovered that TNTs transfer all kinds of cargo beyond microRNAs, including messenger RNAs, proteins, viruses and even whole organelles, such as lysosomes and mitochondria.

“It’s only the tip of the iceberg,” Lou said. “It’s a pretty exciting time to look at these.”

These fragile structures are appearing not only in the context of conditions such as cancer, AIDS and neurodegenerative diseases, but also in normal embryonic development. Healthy adult cells don’t usually make TNTs, but stressed or ailing cells appear to induce them by sending out signals to call for help. It’s unclear, though, how healthy cells sense that their neighbors need help or how they physiologically “know” what specific cargo to send.

QuantaMagazine.org - Cells Talk and Help One Another via Tiny Tube Networks.

The tunneling nanotubes (TNT), look like the pneumatic tubes at the bank used send/get your money to your car! Everybody was so focused on genetic material and tumor growth rate that the interconnecting tissues was basically ignored. Going back over old data verified that it was not a fluke and not contained to cancerous cells.

Although they do spend an awful lot of time talking about cancerous cells the thing that popped out at me was TNT can carry prions. If you wondered why the uproar of downed cattle being sold at market, now you know. It is not safe! The TNT superhighway is open to the them and they travel around in your brain waiting for the day to go full mad cow (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease).

The body is amazing at the lengths it will go through to try and help the entire body survive. And now we know a bit more of how diseases can use the body's own 9-1-1 system against itself. Maybe start really knocking down some of the more insidious diseases.

Bacteria exchange DNA in the same way using what are called pili ... but instead of linear strands that eukaryotes have, prokaryote DNA is circular. Like the 0 and 1 in the Egyptian Ankh

www.hammiverse.com...

Experiments have proven that genetic exchange is occurring. So cancer cells could send out SOS signals and adjacent cells would send out help.

a reply to: stormcell

I thought this was brand new news but it has been a topic of study for a while.

Scientists from the Institut Pasteur have demonstrated the role of lysosomal vesicles in transporting α-synuclein aggregates, responsible for Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative diseases, between neurons. These proteins move from one neuron to the next in lysosomal vesicles which travel along the "tunneling nanotubes" between cells. These findings were published in The EMBO Journal on Aug. 22, 2016.
...

This study demonstrates that TNTs play a significant part in the intercellular transfer of α-synuclein fibrils and reveals the specific role of lysosomes in this process. This represents a major breakthrough in understanding the mechanisms underlying the progression of synucleinopathies.

sciencedaily.com, Aug. 22, 2016 - Tunneling nanotubes between neurons enable the spread of Parkinson's disease via lysosomes.

I think the "news" is that the work is advancing on both fronts of transmission and trying to either block transmission of mRNA, messenger-RNA, etc., or re-inject healthy DNA codes to revamp a cell back to health.

They know that viruses, unlike bacteria, don't move around. Now they might have figured out how they can actually spread cell to cell.

Co-author of the paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Hans-Hermann Gerdes, said the discovery was akin to ultra-thin telephone cables between cells, allowing them to talk to one another.

Gerdes and his colleagues first discovered protein nanotubes (also called membrane nanotubes) in the kidney six years ago using light microscopy. Apart from forming a means of electrical coupling, the nanotubes have also been shown to be able to transport molecules, viruses and prions from cell to cell, at least in a Petri dish. It is not yet known how cells produce nanotubes or how they open the membrane of another cell several cell-widths away.

Some scientists doubted the initial discovery of nanotubes, since there seemed to be no strong evidence that nanotubes are needed physiologically. One critic was Yale microbiologist Walther Mothes, who said he was impressed by the new finding that nanotubes use gap junctions for electrical communication, which he said makes a lot of sense, and should lead to further study of TNTs.

Phys.org, Sept. 2010 - Animal cells communicate electrically over long distances via nanotubes.

No wonder I thought it was new! It happened in pre-history, before I got a drivers license, or learned to read!

It is still cool to read about but sorry for jumping to conclusion that OP was truly "news". It is a nice update that some headway is being made into a new field that was some thought was not even real. 8 years is a relatively short time period for a new discovery.

Cells talk to each other and help each other out via TNTs and a new organ was discovered last month. Neither of these were in my biology text books back in the day... so I guess it is "news" but only because I am dinosaur now!

I can't figure how come these tumor cells do not communicate right with the other body cells. They are our cells. maybe they are arguing about politics or something and cannot live symbiotically. Some tumor cells are just a different cell in the wrong place of the body. Like lung cells in the liver or liver cells in the pancrease. I do not understand how the stem cells got mixed up, maybe they were reading instructions wrote by the chinese.

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Lou worried that the lines he’d noticed might be illusory, so he checked the archive of tumor specimens from patients at the cancer center. Lo and behold, the same long cellular processes were present in the tumors, too, so he set out to investigate their relevance. Since then, as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota, he’s found evidence that tumor cells use these TNTs to share molecular messages in the form of short regulatory snippets of RNA called microRNA, enabling cancer cells resistant to chemotherapy drugs to confer the same resistance on their neighbors.

How did the tunneling nanotubes go unnoticed for such a long time? Lou notes that in the last couple of decades, cancer research has centered primarily on detecting and therapeutically targeting mutations in cancer cells — and not the structures between them. “It’s right in front of our face, but if that’s not what people are focusing on, they’re going to miss it,” he said.

That’s changing now. In the last few years, the number of researchers working on TNTs and figuring out what they do has risen steeply. Research teams have discovered that TNTs transfer all kinds of cargo beyond microRNAs, including messenger RNAs, proteins, viruses and even whole organelles, such as lysosomes and mitochondria.

“It’s only the tip of the iceberg,” Lou said. “It’s a pretty exciting time to look at these.”

These fragile structures are appearing not only in the context of conditions such as cancer, AIDS and neurodegenerative diseases, but also in normal embryonic development. Healthy adult cells don’t usually make TNTs, but stressed or ailing cells appear to induce them by sending out signals to call for help. It’s unclear, though, how healthy cells sense that their neighbors need help or how they physiologically “know” what specific cargo to send.

QuantaMagazine.org - Cells Talk and Help One Another via Tiny Tube Networks.

The tunneling nanotubes (TNT), look like the pneumatic tubes at the bank used send/get your money to your car! Everybody was so focused on genetic material and tumor growth rate that the interconnecting tissues was basically ignored. Going back over old data verified that it was not a fluke and not contained to cancerous cells.

Although they do spend an awful lot of time talking about cancerous cells the thing that popped out at me was TNT can carry prions. If you wondered why the uproar of downed cattle being sold at market, now you know. It is not safe! The TNT superhighway is open to the them and they travel around in your brain waiting for the day to go full mad cow (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease).

The body is amazing at the lengths it will go through to try and help the entire body survive. And now we know a bit more of how diseases can use the body's own 9-1-1 system against itself. Maybe start really knocking down some of the more insidious diseases.

Love the post OP ...thank you....now consider this....deadly pleomorphic bacteria which can morph into viral size have the ability to INTERCEPT THESE COMMUNICATIONS .....lol...seriously.....you need to sometimes hide the knowledge of curative intakes so these smart-bugs don't get the chance to intercept critical transmissions between organs and the body/brain...because if they catch wind of what is coming down the pies at them they can and will MORPH into another form...they are pleomorphic....they look for specific signs and signals to trigger their camouflage and their changes....so giving someone remedial food combined with placebos which have no remedial impacts and NOT telling them what the ingredients are in any given moment will help cut this smart-bugs ability to eavesdrop on cellular level communication.