Could TCTP contribute to Armin Braun's paradigm of tumor reversion in plants?

Armin Braun, a plant geneticist in the 1950–60’s at the Rockefeller, was the first to provide experimental evidence for tumor reversion in plants. Through setting up his experiments in plants, Braun made of tumor reversion a philogenetically conserved system. With today’s understanding of the tumor cell plasticity, pluripotentiality and stemness, Braun’s words spelt 50 years ago sound almost magic: “results of this study indicate that the capacity of teratoma tissue of single cell origin to organize is a reflection of the inherent potentialities of pluripotent tumor cells... clones of teratoma tissue of single-cell origin developed organized structures ... a controlled recovery of crown-gall tumor cells could be accomplished”. However, Braun’s findings have never been explained at the molecular level, and even their malignant phenotype remains to be explored. By studying tumor reversion in human cancer cells, we found that Translationally Controlled Tumor Protein (TCTP) is a key gene that needs to be switched off in order to quit the malignant process and revert. Could TCTP be the molecular link to Armin Braun’s findings? Translationally Controlled Tumor Protein (TCTP) knockout in mice causes embryonic lethality, showing that this gene is essential for development. Most interestingly, Brioudes et al. recently reported that TCTP knockout in plants also resulted in a lethal phenotype. TCTP-lacking adult plants could be rescued by “feeding” the embryos, and the same phenotype, i.e., small size plants, were observed using the RNAi approach. Importantly the KO phenotype Could TCTP contribute to Armin Braun’s paradigm of tumor reversion in plants?