Varying susceptibility of subpopulations along the epithelial-mesenchymal spectrum to undergo EMT

To decode the response of a population to an external stimulus, information about the composition of the population and how the constituent subpopulations respond to the stimulus is essential. In their study, Sekeroglu et al. highlight how seemingly identical clones, based on cell-surface E-cadherin levels, derived from MCF10A cells exhibit varying levels of susceptibility to undergo epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) upon treatment with an EMT inducer. Highlighting the transcriptional and epigenetic differences among the clones driving these distinct outcomes, the study emphasizes the need to characterize tumor phenotypic heterogeneity across multiple regulatory layers to assess these functional differences.