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. 2023 Oct 1;24(19):14815. doi: 10.3390/ijms241914815

Figure 1.

Figure 1

Depiction of EMP and invasion–metastasis cascades in CRC cells [22,40,45]. Along the entire EMT spectrum, CRC cells have different degrees of growth and metastasis. Cells can move along these two states with flexibility since EMT and MET are nonbinary reversible processes. Malignant cells were those that exhibited more epithelial characteristics and less mesenchymal transition. Primary CRC cells undergoing EMT undergo a series of intermolecular changes that lead to loss of intercellular adhesion, including dissolution of intercellular junctions, namely tight junctions (dark blue), adherens junctions (green), and desmosomes (red orange); through this process, cells acquire a mesenchymal phenotype that promotes local migration and invasion. The cells then enter the blood vessels (intravasation), survive in the blood vessels as circulating tumor cells, and leave the blood vessels (extravasation) to seed and colonize the parenchyma of the liver. After seeding locally in the liver, cancer cells undergoing EMT can redifferentiate to an epithelial phenotype through MET, a step that facilitates cell colonization in the liver and development of local metastases. Abbreviations: EMP, epithelial–mesenchymal plasticity; CTC, circulating tumor cells; EMT, epithelial–mesenchymal transition; MET, mesenchymal–epithelial transition.