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Exposure of mouse skin to UVB early in life generates macrophage infiltration and an interferon-γ response that promotes melanocytic survival, evasion of the immune response and oncogenesis.
Three papers report the involvement of SLX4 in the Fanconi anaemia DNA repair pathway, and two papers show that mutations inSLX4cause a new subtype of Fanconi anaemia.
A new study identifies four genes as drivers of PCA progression and as a signature with prognostic value for predicting the risk of developing metastatic PCA.
Charlotte Kuperwasser and colleagues show that BRCA1 regulates SNAI2, which suppresses luminal cell differentiation, leading to the development of basal-like breast cancers.
Telomeres protect chromosomes from degradation and are therefore essential for ensuring genomic stability. These heterochromatic structures are bound by the shelterin complex, which regulates the activity of telomerase at the ends of chromosomes. This Review analyses the role of these telomeric proteins in cancer and ageing through modulating telomere length and protection, as well as through their 'extracurriculum' activities as gene expression regulators by binding to non-telomeric sites.
Invasive cell migration requires the formation of various structures, such as invadopodia and pseudopodia, which require actin assembly. Studies of the mechanisms of various actin nucleation factors that are involved in actin assembly might ultimately provide new treatments for invasive and metastatic disease.
Netrin 1 and members of the Slit family and their receptors are deregulated in a large proportion of human cancers, suggesting that they could be tumour suppressor genes or oncogenes. Evidence for and against these functions is discussed, along with recent data that these ligand–receptor pairs could be promising targets for personalized anticancer therapies.
Cohesin is a conserved multisubunit protein complex with diverse cellular roles. Much has been learned in recent years about the roles of cohesin in a physiological context, whereas its potential and emerging role in tumorigenesis has received relatively little attention. Are alterations in cohesin proteins drivers or passengers in cancer?
Dietary phytochemicals, which are thought to be safe for use as cancer prevention agents, have emerged as modulators of key cellular signalling pathways. The task now is to understand how these chemicals perturb these pathways by modelling their interactions with their target proteins.
Transcriptional mutagenesis is a process by which RNA polymerases produce mutated transcripts from bypassing certain lesions in the DNA. This Perspective discusses how this might occur in tumour cells to contribute to the mutator phenotype.
