Double-edged Protein

To deal with the insults of digestion and infection, cells lining the gut are continuously replaced from a stem cell pool (coloured red in this section of mouse colon). So important is this renewal that, even once cells begin differentiating (green), they can, if necessary, revert back into stem cells thanks to the action of a reprogramming factor called ZFP. Because colorectal cancer cells exploit this ZFP-driven pathway to form new tumours, inhibiting ZFP has been suggested as a possible therapeutic strategy. However, while this could potentially work in many cases, in a small proportion of patients, loss-of-function mutations of ZFP are linked with worse outcomes. Unable to re-form stem cells, ZFP-deficient cancer cells differentiate into all manner of cells, making highly heterogeneous tumours that are hard to treat. Determining the ZFP status of colorectal cancer patients would therefore be important for knowing whether ZFP-targeting drugs would be of benefit.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Qingwen Jiang and colleagues
• Molecular Pharmacology Program, Sloan Kettering Institute, New York, NY, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature, August 2026