Research led by Queen Mary University of London, King's College London and the Francis Crick Institute has identified a protein that makes melanoma, the most serious type of skin cancer, more aggressive by giving cancer cells the ability to change shape of the nucleus - a feature that allows them to migrate and spread throughout the body.
The protein is called LAP1, and increased levels of it are linked to a poor prognosis in patients with the cancer.
The study, published in Nature Cell Biology, team stimulated aggressive and less aggressive melanoma cells in laboratory experiments to migrate through pores in an artificial membrane that was smaller than the size of their nucleus.
The aggressive cells came from a metastasis site in a melanoma patient,
Imaging conducted after the migration experiments showed that aggressive cells were able to move through pores more efficiently than less aggressive ones by forming bulges at the edge of their nucleus.
Genetic analyzes of the melanoma cells revealed that the aggressive cells that formed these bumps contained higher levels of the LAP1 protein, which is found within the membrane surrounding the nucleus (called the nuclear envelope).
"Currently there are no drugs that directly target LAP1," concludes one of the research authors, Jeremy Carlton, "so looking to the future we would like to study ways to target this protein and the swelling of the nuclear envelope.