Senescent and myofibroblastic cancer-associated fibroblasts share a contractile phenotype regulated by NOX4 generation of reactive oxygen species in the tumour microenvironment. Senescent and myofibroblastic cancer-associated fibroblasts share a contractile phenotype regulated by NOX4 generation of reactive oxygen species in the tumour microenvironment

Cancer associated fibroblasts characterized by an myofibroblastic phenotype play a major role in the tumour microenvironment, being associated with poor prognosis. We found that this cell population is made in part by senescent fibroblasts in vivo. As senescent fibroblasts and myofibroblasts have been shown to share similar tumour promoting functions in vitro we compared the transcriptosomes of these two fibroblast types and performed RNA-seq of human foetal foreskin fibroblasts 2 (HFFF2) treated with 2ng/ml TGF-beta-1 to induce myofibroblast differentiation or 10Gy gamma irradiation to induce senescence. We isolated RNA 7 days upon this treatments changing the medium 3 days before the RNA extraction.