Overcompensating

Like a large business needs an internal communications team and efficient post room to keep everything working smoothly together, cells require systems to keep departments in tune. Nucleoporins are proteins that ferry essential messages from the nucleus (the cell’s HQ) to other areas, but mutations linked to these can play a role in cancer development. To understand why, researchers examined protein production in fruit fly wings (pictured, nucleoporins labelled green) when certain nucleoporins are disabled. Without them, cell cycles were disrupted, and both cell death and cell replication increased. The extra proliferation of material compensates for the cell death, but if nucleoporin failures coincide with other mutations that block cell death, unrestricted growth occurs and cancers arise. This revealed that nucleoporin mutations change protein synthesis, which impacts cell signalling to cause compensatory growth, and can, in combination with other factors, cause cancer, highlighting them as a potential target for future treatments.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Ajai J. Pulianmackal and colleagues
• Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Image on cover of Disease Models & Mechanisms, March 2022