“Do not erase.” “Recycle me.” “Free to a good home.” Humans post these signs to indicate whether something has value or not, whether it should be disposed of or not. Inside our cells, a sophisticated recycling system uses its own enzymatic signs to flag certain cells for destruction — and a different set of enzymes can remove those flags.

Changing the balance between those two groups might provide a way to control a dangerous protein called SNAI2 that helps cancers metastasize, said Yibin Kang, Princeton’s Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology, who has spent his career studying the cells and molecules behind metastatic cancers. His team has a pair of papers coming out in next month’s issue of Genes and Development, released online today.

Read here for full story by Liz Fuller-Wright, Office of Communications