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Researchers at the Crick are tackling the big questions about human health and disease, and new findings are published every week.

Our faculty have picked some of the most significant papers published by Crick scientists, all of which are freely available thanks to our open science policy.

Tumour microenvironment

New imaging pipeline developed to decipher cell-specific metabolic functions

Researchers at the Crick and NPL, as part of the CRUK Grand Challenges team Rosetta, have developed a multimodal imaging pipeline that extends upon the principles of correlative light, electron, and ion microscopy (CLEIM), which combines confocal microscopy reporter or probe-based fluorescence, electron microscopy (EM), stable isotope labelling and Nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS). Their protocol allows an unprecedented extraction of biological information from specimens, whilst being based on a series of well-established and widely available technologies, thus allowing quick adaptation of the protocol for individual research needs. This integration provides a multifaceted view of the tissue microenvironment, capturing both the internal cellular architecture and the intricate metabolic dynamics occurring within. The researchers tested their pipeline by imaging the incorporation of carbon from glucose into B and T cells in mouse liver tumours.

A multimodal imaging pipeline to decipher cell-specific metabolic functions and tissue microenvironment dynamics

Published in Nature Protocols

Published

Normal mouse mammary glands and stained glands.

Reducing vitamin B5 slows breast cancer growth in mice

A group of researchers led by the Francis Crick Institute, working with the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and Imperial College London, have discovered that breast cancer cells expressing a cancer-driving gene heavily rely on vitamin B5 to grow and survive. The researchers are part of Cancer Grand Challenges team Rosetta, funded by Cancer Research UK.

The researchers developed tumours inside mice with two different types of cells, either with high or low levels of Myc. They also transplanted human breast cancer tumour tissue into mice, which also had a mixture of Myc-high and Myc-low areas. They saw that vitamin B5 was associated with Myc-high areas of both mice and human transplanted tumours. This association was also observed in biopsies taken from patients with breast cancer. They then fed mice a vitamin B5-deficient diet, and saw that their Myc-low and Myc-high mixed tumours grew more slowly than tumours in mice who were fed a standard diet. The researchers believe that this association with tumour growth is due to the key role vitamin B5 plays in metabolism.

Vitamin B5 supports MYC oncogenic metabolism and tumor progression in breast cancer

Read Crick news article

Published in Nature Metabolism

Published

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Research case studies 

Explore a selection of recent case studies that spotlight particular areas of research at the Crick.