Princeton Researchers Link Phase Separations to Cancer and Discover Organelle (IMAGE)

Princeton University

Princeton Researchers Link Phase Separations to Cancer and Discover Organelle

Caption

Princeton cancer researchers Professor Yibin Kang and Dr. Mark Esposito discovered a new, still-unnamed organelle that plays a role in bone metastasis and is formed via liquid-liquid phase separation -- when liquid blobs of living materials merge into each other. "We believe this is the first time that phase separation has been implicated in cancer metastasis," said Kang. This 3D image of human breast cancer bone metastases shows the formation of the newly described organelle (magenta) in cancer cells (cyan). Cell nuclei from both cancer cells and normal bone cells are labeled in blue.

Credit

Image rendering by Mark Esposito and Gary Laevsky

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