Cell competition is a form of cell interaction that allows fitter cells (called ‘winners’) to kill less fit cells (called ‘losers’) and colonize tissues in their stead. The goal of the research we carry out in my group is to understand cell competition, its mechanism of action and how it modulates cell colonization in tissues and organs.
Our group has recently discovered that mammalian cells can compete using mechanical insults. In mechanical cell competition, loser cells have intrinsic hypersensitivity to cell density and crowding from winner cells kills them by apoptosis. A key player in mechanical cell competition is p53, which we find to be necessary and sufficient for cells to become hypersensitive to cell compaction and behave as mechanical losers. Since p53 is upregulated by a wealth of cellular stress conditions, this suggests that mechanical cell competition may be a widespread mechanism to eliminate damaged cells from tissues. Our recent unpublished work has identified the first physiological context where mechanical cell competition may play a role, i.e. in collective cell migration and epithelial wound healing.