Abstract
Cancer stem cell (CSC) theory suggests a cell-lineage structure in cancer that CSCs are capable of giving rise to the other non-stem cancer cells (NSCCs) but not vice versa. However, an alternative scenario of bidirectional interconversions between CSCs and NSCCs was proposed in [Gupta PB, et al. (2011) Cell 146: 633644]. Here we present computational analyses for further investigating the relation between CSCs and NSCCs through population modeling of cancer cells, where not only can CSCs differentiate into NSCCs by asymmetric cell division, NSCCs can also dedifferentiate into CSCs by cell state conversion. By validating our model with recent experimental data, it is shown that the conversion from CSCs to NCSSs explains the transient increase in the proportion of CSCs initiated from the purified NSCCs subpopulation. Our results indicate that cell-state conversions in cancer play important role s in effectively keeping the heterogeneity in the population of cancer cells.
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