Myc conquers all

More Myc makes you stronger, according to Eduardo Moreno and Konrad Basler (Universität Zürich, Switzerland) and Claire de la Cova, Laura Johnston (Columbia University, New York, NY), and colleagues. They find that cell clones producing more dMyc overproliferate and outcompete their neighbors, with the neighbors dying off by apoptosis.

The concept of cell competition is not a new one. Fly cells mutant for various ribosomal proteins are known to suffer from competition-based elimination by wild-type cells. But now the two groups show that competition occurs in response to varying levels of the growth promoter dMyc, even when the “weaker” of the two cell groups are expressing wild-type levels of dMyc.

The Swiss group found that weaker cells could be rescued by either stimulating their rate of endocytosis (with...