A metabolic signaling role for arginine in liver cancer

In addition to their canonical roles in biosynthetic pathways, metabolites can be active participants in oncogenic signaling, but our understanding of these signaling mechanisms is incomplete. In a recent article published in Cell, Mossmann and colleagues find a novel signaling role for accumulated arginine in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), mediated by the RNA splicing factor and transcriptional modifier RNA-binding protein 39 (RBM39).