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Record W4413110887 · doi:10.1038/s42255-025-01339-1

d-cysteine impairs tumour growth by inhibiting cysteine desulfurase NFS1

2025· article· en· W4413110887 on OpenAlex
Joséphine Zangari, Oliver Stehling, Sven‐Andreas Freibert, Kaushik Bhattacharya, Florian Rouaud, Véronique Serre‐Beinier, Kinsey Maundrell, Sylvie Montessuit, Sabrina Ferré, Evangelia Vartholomaiou, Vinzent Schulz, Karim Zuhra, Víctor González‐Ruiz, Sahra Hanschke, Takashi Tsukamoto, Michaël Cerezo, Csaba Szabó, Serge Rudaz, Michal T. Boniecki, Mirosław Cygler, Roland Lill, Jean‐Claude Martinou

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueNature Metabolism · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicFolate and B Vitamins Research
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Saskatchewan
FundersOncosuisseSchweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen ForschungFondation Ernst et Lucie SchmidheinyDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
KeywordsCancer cellCell biologyCystineIntracellularMitochondrionCysteineChemistryBiochemistryBiologyCancerEnzyme

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Selective targeting of cancer cells is a major challenge for cancer therapy. Many cancer cells overexpress the cystine/glutamate antiporter xCT/CD98, an L-cystine transport system that strengthens antioxidant defences, thereby promoting tumour survival and progression. Here, we show that the D-enantiomer of cysteine (D-Cys) is selectively imported into xCT/CD98-overexpressing cancer cell lines and impairs their proliferation, particularly under high oxygen concentrations. Intracellular D-Cys specifically inhibits the mitochondrial cysteine desulfurase NFS1, a key enzyme of cellular iron-sulfur protein biogenesis, by blocking sulfur mobilization due to steric constraints. NFS1 inhibition by D-Cys affects all cellular iron-sulfur cluster-dependent functions, including mitochondrial respiration, nucleotide metabolism and maintenance of genome integrity, leading to decreased oxygen consumption, DNA damage and cell cycle arrest. D-Cys administration diminishes tumour growth of human triple-negative breast cancer cells implanted orthotopically into the mouse mammary gland. Hence, D-Cys could represent a simple therapy to selectively target those forms of cancer characterized by overexpression of xCT/CD98.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.064
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.288
Teacher spread0.283 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it