Nutrient requirements of organ-specific metastasis in breast cancer

, yet the factors that determine the organs where cancers can metastasize are incompletely understood. Here we quantify the absolute levels of 124 metabolites in multiple tissues in mice and investigate how this relates to the ability of breast cancer cells to grow in different organs. We engineered breast cancer cells with broad metastatic potential to be auxotrophic for specific nutrients and assessed their ability to colonize different tissue sites. We then asked how tumour growth in different tissues relates to nutrient availability and tumour biosynthetic activity. We find that single nutrients alone do not define the sites where breast cancer cells can grow as metastases. In addition, we identify purine…