It’s a cell-eat-cell world out there—and not just for single-celled organisms. Indeed, even people have something of the cannibal in their cells, even cells that have nothing to do with malignancy or immune function. What we know about cell-eat-cell phenomena—or, more generally, cell- -cell phenomena—has been reviewed by scientists based at Arizona State University.
They performed a systematic screening of 508 articles, from which they chose 115 relevant articles in a search for cell-in-cell events across the tree of life, the age of cell-in-cell-related genes, and whether cell-in-cell events are associated with normal multicellular development or cancer. The scientists, led by Carlo C. Maley, PhD, director of the Arizona Cancer and Evolution Center, presented their findings in , in a paper titled, “ .
” “Cell-in-cell events are found across the tree of life, from some unicellular to many multicellular organisms, including non-neoplastic and neoplastic tissue,” the article’s authors wrote. “Additionally, out of the 38 cell-in-cell-related genes found in the literature, 14 genes were over 2.2 billion years old, that is, older than the common ancestor of some facultatively multicellular taxa.
All of this suggests that cell-in-cell events may have originated before the origins of obligate multicellularity.” The widespread occurrence of interactions in which cells become internalized by other cells suggests that these events are not inherently “selfish” o.