The Polyploid State Plays a Tumor-Suppressive Role in the Liver (Developmental Cell)

Most liver cells are polyploid, but the functional role of wholesale genome duplications is unknown. To interrogate liver polyploidy function without irreversible manipulations of cell-cycle genes, Zhang et al. developed models to transiently alter ploidy, finding that polyploidy reduces tumor development by buffering against tumor-suppressor loss of heterozygosity.