We have a new preprint out. This is a short post to describe our findings and highlight some of the software I developed for analysing cell migration and cell shape data.
Intracellular nanovesicles mediate integrin trafficking during cell migration
bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2020.08.19.257287
It is mainly the work of Gabrielle Larocque with help from Penny La-Borde (vesicle binding/biochemistry), Nick Clarke (CLEM), and Daniel Moore (Rab imaging). The invasion experiments were in collaboration with Bev Wilson and Pat Caswell at University of Manchester. You can meet the people in the lab here.
We recently discovered intracellular nanovesicles (INVs) in cells: tiny transport vesicles involved in vesicle transport (see previous post).
INVs have a marker called TPD54, which when depleted from cells, impairs cell migration and invasion in a cancer context (see movie above). In the paper, we describe that INVs mediate integrin traffic, which explains the migratory phenotype.
TPD54 is part of a family of TPD52-like (tumor protein D52-like) proteins. The expression of these proteins is altered in cancer, particularly metastatic cancers. Which suggested that these proteins may be involved in cell migration and invasion.
We found that TPD52 and TPD53 are also INV proteins and that their depletion also affects migration. We used this information to document the Rab GTPases on INVs in cells. One of them is Rab25, an oncogene with a role in integrin traffic. Overexpression of TPD52 and TPD54 is linked with Rab25 amplification in certain cancers. Which suggests that INV-mediated transport of integrins is associated with cancer progression.
The paper also describes two analysis pipelines:
The data and code for the preprint can be found here.
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The post title is taken from “Culture Move” by Asian Dub Foundation from their album Rafi’s Revenge.
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