Inducing Sequential Cycles of Epithelial-Mesenchymal and Mesenchymal-Epithelial Transitions in Mammary Epithelial Cells.

Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition (EMT) and its reciprocal Mesenchymal-Epithelial Transition (MET) occur naturally as a cycling process during embryonic and foetal development. The capacity of such iterative cycles to drive cell fate and cellular and molecular behaviour in physiology or pathology remains unclear. We describe here a protocol to induce successive cycles of EMT/MET in an untransformed human mammary epithelial cell line (MCF10A) as well as the necessary controls for cycle validation.