EUGENE, Ore.–Understanding a system that controls the growth of cells in a tiny worm’s gut could potentially lead to new therapies for colon cancer, which will kill nearly 50,000 Americans this year.

The worm’s intestinal growth system operates in a more complex way than previously understood, according to University of Oregon research published in the June 24 issue of Nature. While this might seem to be an obscure bit of scientific trivia of interest only to worm biologists, its implication reverberates much more broadly, as it may well prove relevant to our understanding of colon cancer in humans.

The research, conducted by UO biologist Bruce Bowerman and his laboratory associates, reveals the existence of a new mechanism that controls intestinal development in a nematode worm, C. elegans.

In the past, Bowerman explains, it appeared that cell growth in this pathway was regulated by a toggle switch that would serve as a growth repressor until switched into a growth activator.

"Our findings now show that this is not the only form of control in play," he says. "The second form of control we’ve discovered disconnects the switch altogether and thereby eliminates its growth suppression function."

Bowerman, a member of the UO Institute of Molecular Biology, notes that both switches could be important in colon cancer, and that further research into the mechanism by which the switch is disconnected might open promising avenues in efforts to develop drugs or other treatments.

Bowerman’s work focuses on the communication that occurs between cells during the earliest developmental stages of the C. elegans embryo, when the organism consists of only two or four cells.

"The worm’s genetic make-up is astoundingly similar to that of a human," Bowerman says. "Some of the genes we are studying in worms encode proteins that are 70 percent identical to their human counterparts."

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