A Berkeley Lab study has shown how communities of different types of breast cells self-organize into breast tissue. This helps explain how the processes of stem cell differentiation and tissue architecture maintenance are coordinated, and might lead to a better understanding of what goes wrong in cancer.

By programming cells with short lengths of synthetic DNA on their surfaces, scientists at the Molecular Foundry control how different cell types bind together to form complex artificial microtissues for potential uses in medicine and in medical and biological research.

Working with unique chips that mimic actual molecular conditions in the breast, a team of researchers led by Berkeley Lab’s Mark LaBarge and Mina Bissell has shown that the ultimate fate of a stem or progenitor cell in a woman’s breast – whether the cell develops normally or whether it turns cancerous – may depend upon signals from multiple microenvironments