A versatile system to record cell-cell interactions
- Stanford University School of Medicine, United States
Abstract
Cell-cell interactions influence all aspects of development, homeostasis, and disease. In cancer, interactions between cancer cells and stromal cells play a major role in nearly every step of carcinogenesis. Thus, the ability to record cell-cell interactions would facilitate mechanistic delineation of the role of cancer microenvironment. Here, we describe GFP-based Touching Nexus (G-baToN) which relies upon nanobody-directed fluorescent protein transfer to enable sensitive and specific labeling of cells after cell-cell interactions. G-baToN is a generalizable system that enables physical contact-based labeling between various human and mouse cell types, including endothelial cell-pericyte, neuron-astrocyte, and diverse cancer-stromal cell pairs. A suite of orthogonal baToN tools enables reciprocal cell-cell labeling, interaction-dependent cargo transfer, and the identification of higher-order cell-cell interactions across a wide range of cell types. The ability to track physically interacting cells with these simple and sensitive systems will greatly accelerate our understanding of the outputs of cell-cell interactions in cancer as well as across many biological processes.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Cancer Institute (CA175336)
- Monte M Winslow
National Cancer Institute (CA207133)
- Monte M Winslow
National Cancer Institute (CA230919)
- Monte M Winslow
Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (27FT-0044)
- Rui Tang
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee ( the Administrative Panel on Laboratory Animal Care (APLAC)) protocols (26696) of Stanford University. The protocol was approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments of Stanford University (Permit Number: A3213-01). Every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2020, Tang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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A versatile system to record cell-cell interactions
eLife 9:e61080.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.61080
