Phosphoglycerate mutase 1 regulates dNTP pool and promotes homologous recombination repair in cancer cells

Shutting down the power supply for DNA repair in cancer cells

van Vugt previews work by Qu et al. linking the metabolic enzyme PGAM1 to the pool of nucleotides needed for proper DNA repair in cancer cells.

Phosphoglycerate mutase 1 (PGAM1) functions in glycolysis. In this issue, Qu et al. (2017. J. Cell Biol.https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.201607008) show that PGAM1 inactivation leads to nucleotide depletion, which causes defective homologous recombination–mediated DNA repair, suggesting that targeting metabolic enzymes increases cancer cell susceptibility to DNA damaging agents.