What is it about?
Cell death is important in normal development and physiology, but can go awry in different disease conditions including cancer. This article is a protocol that shows researchers how to use acidity to cause cell death in tumour cell lines, and describes a method (known as flow cytometry) to visualize this cell death.
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Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Other techniques to study cell death have several limitations. This article provides a robust method for using acidity to induce cell death and to study different stages of cell death using flow cytometry.
Perspectives
I hope that this article helps other researchers realize that tumour acidity plays a role in driving tumour cell behaviour. Hopefully, they can use the method described here to help them study cell death in cancer in their own laboratories.
Catherine Worsley
University of Pretoria
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Inducing apoptosis using chemical treatment and acidic pH, and detecting it using the Annexin V flow cytometric assay, PLoS ONE, June 2022, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270599.
You can read the full text:
Resources
The effect of acute acid exposure on immunomodulatory protein secretion, cell survival, and cell cycle progression in tumour cell lines
The acidic tumour microenvironment influences tumour cell survival, proliferation, and immune evasion. This article presents data on the effect of low pH on breast and oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma cell (OSCC) lines. Distinct differences in apoptosis were noted between the cell lines, with OSCC better adapted to survive acidic conditions and release pro-tumourigenic compounds. This highlights the important role that tumour acidity plays in driving the evolution of different tumour types.
The acidic tumour microenvironment: Manipulating the immune response to elicit escape
This review article highlights the role that the acidic tumour microenvironment plays in driving immune escape. It describes the effects on different immune cell types, and also discusses therapeutic options to target the acidic tumour microenvironment.
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