Skip to main content

EDITORIAL article

Front. Cell Dev. Biol., 01 December 2022
Sec. Signaling
This article is part of the Research Topic Cell Signaling Status Alteration in Development and Disease View all 6 articles

Editorial: Cell signaling status alteration in development and disease

  • 1School of Life Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
  • 2Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
  • 3Shanghai Center for Systems Biomedicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
  • 4National Center for Toxicological Research, US Food and Drug Administration, Jefferson, AR, United States
  • 5Center for Data Processing, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

Organisms respond and adapt to the internal and external environmental changes through various cell signaling. The abnormal alteration of cell-signaling pathways could disrupt cell homeostasis and cause diseases (Ehnnsen and Ditzel, 2021; Nong et al., 2021). For instance, the dysfunction of immune cell signaling has been frequently reported to be pathological hallmarks for various human diseases, such as cancer (Bayik and Lathia, 2021), sepsis (Chen and Wei, 2021), and autoimmune diseases (Hou et al., 2022). Hence, the in-depth studies of alteration of cell signaling status can effectively facilitate our understanding of cell development and provide us specific information for the disease diagnosis and therapy.

Although cell signaling can be measured through development of sequencing technologies and the application of effective bioinformatic tools (Gilbert et al., 2019; Knapp et al., 2019; Ghosh et al., 2021), many questions remain to be answered. Identifying the association between various signaling pathways and human behavior and diseases will help address these questions. Integrative analysis of different signal pathways that enable comprehensive mapping of cell development and the disease occurrence and progression (Chen et al., 2008; Rodchenkov et al., 2020; Zhang-James et al., 2019). In this Research Topic on Cell Signaling Status Alteration in Development and Disease, we collected studies providing new insights into the roles of cell signaling in development and disease occurrence and progression. A total of 5 articles, including two reviews, two original researches and one method article, were published in this Research Topic. We summarize and discuss the main findings of these studies in this editorial.

Wnt signaling plays an important role in the mammary gland development and adult homeostasis in virtually all animal species. Willy et al. provided a systematic review on Wnt signaling involved in breast cancer and explored the impact of Wnt signaling alteration on the tumorigenesis and disease occurrence (Abreu de Oliveira et al.). Yang et al. comprehensively reviewed the role of cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS)—a stimulator of the interferon gene (STING) signaling pathway in various diseases, such as acute injury, pneumonopathy and kidney diseases, providing a theoretical basis for immunotherapy targeting the STING signal pathway (Yang et al.). Ma et al. found that miR-654-5p overexpresses in activated human hepatic stellate cells and TGFβ-treated human hepatic LX-2 cells augmented liver fibrosis in mice that were intraperitoneally injected with CCl4 by targeting the RXRα receptor (Ma et al.). Zhang et al. proposed a robust method to acquire finely resolved transcriptional programs with few cells from snap-frozen or RNAlater-treated clinical tissues that was sufficient enough to resolve even isoforms based on immunofluorescence-guided laser capture microdissection (immuno-LCM-RNAseq). With this method, the researchers were able to analyze transcriptional networks and signaling pathways during development, pathogenesis, and aging of specific cell types within native tissues (Zhang et al.). Lou et al. integrated both immune and hypoxia signaling to establish reliable prognostic signatures for lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) across different omics data, and provided a robust prognosis predictor for the LUAD patients (Lou et al.).

The studies published in this Research Topic presented a diversity of intriguing and meaningful results covering a range of cell signals, which could facilitate our understanding of development and disease. We hope that this Research Topic will inspire researchers to systematically investigate development and disease progression from the perspective of cell signal in a systematic way.

Author contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Author disclaimer

This editorial reflects the views of the authors and does not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

References

Bayik, D., and Lathia, J. D. (2021). Cancer stem cell-immune cell crosstalk in tumour progression. Nat. Rev. Cancer 21 (8), 526–536. doi:10.1038/s41568-021-00366-w

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Chen, J., and Wei, H. M. (2021). Immune Intervention in sepsis. Front. Pharmacol. 12. doi:10.3389/fphar.2021.718089

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Chen, X., Xu, H., Yuan, P., Fang, F., Huss, M., Vega, V. B., et al. (2008). Integration of external signaling pathways with the core transcriptional network in embryonic stem cells. Cell 133 (6), 1106–1117. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2008.04.043

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Ehnnsen, S., and Ditzel, H. J. (2021). Signaling pathways essential for triple-negative breast cancer stem-like cells. Stem Cells 39 (2), 133–143. doi:10.1002/stem.3301

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Ghosh, S., Datta, A., and Choi, H. J. N. C. (2021). multiSLIDE is a web server for exploring connected elements of biological pathways in multi-omics data. Nat. Commun. 12 (1), 2279–2311. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-22650-x

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Gilbert, H. T., Mallikarjun, V., Dobre, O., Jackson, M. R., Pedley, R., Gilmore, A. P., et al. (2019). Nuclear decoupling is part of a rapid protein-level cellular response to high-intensity mechanical loading. Nat. Commun. 10 (1), 4149–4215. doi:10.1038/s41467-019-11923-1

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Hou, M. Y., Wei, Y. S., Zhao, Z. Y., Han, W. Q., Zhou, R. X., Zhou, Y., et al. (2022). Immuno-engineered Nanodecoys for the multi-Target Anti-Inflammatory Treatment of autoimmune diseases. Adv. Mat. 34 (12), e2108817. doi:10.1002/adma.202108817

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Knapp, B. D., Odermatt, P., Rojas, E. R., Cheng, W., He, X., Huang, K. C., et al. (2019). Decoupling of Rates of protein Synthesis from cell Expansion Leads to Supergrowth. Cell Syst. 9 (5), 434–445. doi:10.1016/j.cels.2019.10.001

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Nong, S. J., Wei, Z. Q., Wang, Z. W., Ma, L. M., Guan, Y. B., and Ni, J. (2021). Reduced DAPK1 expression Promotes stem cell-like Characteristics of Prostate cancer cells by activating ZEB1 via Hippo/YAP signaling pathway. Stem Cells Dev. 30 (18), 934–945. doi:10.1089/scd.2021.0043

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Rodchenkov, I., Babur, O., Luna, A., Aksoy, B. A., Wong, J. V., Fong, D., et al. (2020). Pathway Commons 2019 Update: Integration, analysis and exploration of pathway data. Nucleic Acids Res. 48 (D1), D489–D497. doi:10.1093/nar/gkz946

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Zhang-James, Y., Fernandez-Castillo, N., Hess, J. L., Malki, K., Glatt, S. J., Cormand, B., et al. (2019). An integrated analysis of genes and functional pathways for aggression in human and rodent models. Mol. Psychiatry 24 (11), 1655–1667. doi:10.1038/s41380-018-0068-7

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Keywords: signal pathway, CGAS, STING, multi-omic analyses, Wnt signaling

Citation: Wu J, Liu H, Zhao X, Hong H and Werner J (2022) Editorial: Cell signaling status alteration in development and disease. Front. Cell Dev. Biol. 10:1068887. doi: 10.3389/fcell.2022.1068887

Received: 13 October 2022; Accepted: 24 October 2022;
Published: 01 December 2022.

Edited and reviewed by:

Ana Cuenda, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Spain

Copyright © 2022 Wu, Liu, Zhao, Hong and Werner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Jun Wu, anVud3UzMDJAZ21haWwuY29tJiN4MDIwMGE7

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.