A protein acts at the control center of cancer cells to stop cancer from spreading

This study sheds light on an important pathway by which glutin promotes cancer development and provides insights into potential pathways to block its effects

Fasin is known to control the structures that allow cells to move—specifically, a combination of protein bundles called actin, which make tiny "legs" that cancer cells can use to migrate to distant locations in the body

"We have previously shown that, at specific points in the cell growth cycle, fasin resides in the cell's control center, the nucleus," explains the study's lead author Campbell Lawson, Randall Cell and Molecular Biology, King's College London, UK.

To learn more about fascin, the team created a series of cancer cell lines with and without functional fascin, as well as a suite of fluorescently labeled fascin "nanobodies" to change their location in cells, and explored Its interaction with other proteins in the nucleus

They found that fastin actively moves in and out of the nucleus, and once it reaches the nucleus, it supports the assembly of actin bundles

Given its interactions with histones, the team looked to see if tenins were also involved in the DNA repair process in cancer cells that helps them survive

Although nucleofugin plays an important role in nuclear actin assembly, DNA structure and repair, it is also important in the cytoplasm of cells, where it helps cancer cells build tiny appendages called filopodia that promote cancer cell invasion

Maddy Parsons, Professor of Cell Biology at the Randall Centre for Cell and Molecular Biophysics at King's College London, concluded: "Our study provides a new role for myosin in controlling nuclear actin bundling to support tumor cell survival.

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Nucleofugin regulates cancer cell survival