Could someone who knows their biology help out with an article summary? So many words here that I'm lost on, but nonethless I'm excited for the prospect of the title.
This just seems like a slightly better understanding of something that was already known to exist.
Eh I thought it was pretty well summed up:
The researchers then explored what happened when they prevented autophagy in the crisis cells. The results were striking: without cell death via autophagy to stop them, the cells replicated tirelessly. Furthermore, when the team looked at these cells’ chromosomes, they were fused and disfigured, indicating that severe DNA damage of the kind seen in cancerous cells was occurring, and revealing autophagy to be an important early cancer-suppressing mechanism.
Finally, the team tested what happened when they induced specific kinds of DNA damage in the normal cells, either to the ends of the chromosomes (via telomere loss) or to regions in the middle. Cells with telomere loss activated autophagy, while cells with DNA damage to other chromosomal regions activated apoptosis. This shows that apoptosis is not the only mechanism to destroy cells that may be precancerous due to DNA damage and that there is direct cross-talk between telomeres and autophagy.
The work reveals that, rather than being a mechanism that fuels unsanctioned growth of cancerous cells (by cannibalizing other cells to recycle raw materials), autophagy is actually a safeguard against such growth. Without autophagy, cells that lose other safety measures, such as tumour-suppressing genes, advance to a crisis state of unchecked growth, rampant DNA damage–and often cancer. (Once cancer has begun, blocking autophagy may still be a valid strategy of “starving” a tumour, as a 2015 study by Salk Professor Reuben Shaw, a co-author on the current paper, discovered.)
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