Putting down Plectin

Over 6500 people are diagnosed with liver cancer in the UK every year. To develop new treatments, researchers looked to the cytoskeleton – a cell’s inner scaffolding which can be altered in cancer giving the advantage to grow and spread. They focused on plectin, a protein that links different cytoskeleton building blocks and whose levels are raised in liver cancer. In a mouse model of liver cancer, mice lacking plectin in their liver cells had fewer and smaller tumours than normal mice. Looking at liver cancer cells (pictured) without plectin (top right), with abnormal plectin (bottom left) or with normal plectin inhibited by a drug (bottom right) revealed cytoskeletons all out of shape (white). And these cells couldn’t move as well as liver cancer cells with normal plectin (top left). Plectin may, therefore, be a good target for future liver cancer treatments.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Zuzana Outla and colleagues
• Laboratory of Integrative Biology, Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, March 2025