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Tumour metabolites hinder DNA repair

Altered metabolism and genome instability are hallmarks of cancer. A mechanism now explains how three small molecules that accumulate in tumours connect abnormal metabolism to genomic problems by hindering DNA repair.
  1. Lei-Lei Chen

    1. Lei-Lei Chen is in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27516, USA.

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  2. Yue Xiong

    1. Yue Xiong is in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27516, USA.

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Towards the end of the nineteenth century, chromosomal abnormalities detected under the light microscope revealed that a type of massive genome instability resulting in an abnormal number of chromosomes occurs in certain types of cancer. Not long after, the biochemist Otto Warburg observed that tumour cells tend to use pathways of glucose and energy metabolism that are distinct from those used by normal cells. We now know that genome instability and altered metabolism are two common characteristics of most tumour cells. Genome instability has been investigated continuously since its discovery; altered metabolism was rediscovered as a research area only recently. But not much crosstalk between these two processes in cancer has been reported so far. Writing in Nature, Sulkowski et al.1 reveal how several metabolites that accumulate to high levels in tumour cells suppress DNA repair, thus revealing a direct link between altered metabolism and genome instability caused by DNA damage.

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Nature 582, 492-494 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01569-1

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