Squeeze a living cell into a tight space and something remarkable happens. Rather than breaking under the pressure, it can change shape and adapt to its surroundings.
For researcher Zahraa Alraies, understanding how cells do this could help answer much bigger questions about what makes a healthy cell behave differently from a cancerous one.
Changes in the shape of a cell’s nucleus, the part that holds its genetic material, are already used to help diagnose cancer. Learning what drives those changes could one day contribute to earlier detection and new ways of stopping the disease from spreading.
“Our cells are not solid like Lego pieces,” Alraies says. “They are more like Play-Doh. They can reshape themselves.”
Alraies has spent almost eight years studying this ability to adapt, first in immune cells and now as an associate research scientist in NYU Abu Dhabi’s Laboratory of Cell and Molecular Biology under Professor Piergiorgio Percipalle, where she is addressing similar questions into new biological systems.
One of the most striking differences she is investigating emerges when cells are placed under extreme physical pressure.
“In breast cancer, when the space is very restricted, a healthy cell will shut down and go to sleep, whereas the cancer cell wakes up and becomes even more invasive,” she says. “I wanted to understand why.”
Finding her place in research
Alraies grew up in Syria with an early interest in science and the human body, which led her to study pharmacy. She later worked in pharmaceutical laboratories before briefly running her own pharmacy.
After moving to Paris in 2015, she enrolled in a biomedical engineering master’s program and completed an internship at Institut Curie. She later secured a Marie Curie-funded IC3i fellowship for a PhD studying how dendritic immune cells respond to physical stress.
Just as her research career was beginning, Alraies discovered she was pregnant with her first child.
“I didn’t want to give up the fellowship, and I also wanted to become a mother, so I decided I would do both,” she says.
Her research was eventually published in Nature Immunology. Alraies went on to have two more children and says combining motherhood with science has taught her to let go of the expectation of doing everything perfectly.
“You cannot be perfect in everything,” she says. “You have to accept that you are both a mom and a professional who wants to do something for yourself.”
What makes cancer cells different
Alraies’s work developed into a broader interest in mechanobiology, the study of how cells sense and respond to physical forces.
Her current research examines this process in stem cells focusing on the role of a nuclear protein called beta-actin, part of the cell’s cytoskeleton that helps it maintain its shape. By comparing cells with and without nuclear beta-actin under controlled levels of physical confinement, Alraies is investigating whether this protein helps determine how cells sense, adapt to, and remember mechanical stress.
It is known as "fundamental" science, which seeks to understand how cells work rather than directly developing a drug or diagnostic test. Those discoveries can provide the foundations for future ways to diagnose and treat disease.
Cancer is one area where that knowledge could prove important. As cells in solid tumors grow and spread, they can be forced through confined spaces, yet cancer cells can survive levels of pressure that cause healthy cells to stop functioning.
The shape of the nucleus already provides pathologists with clues when examining cancer biopsies. Alraies hopes understanding the mechanisms behind these changes could eventually help researchers identify dangerous cells earlier and find new ways to prevent them from spreading.
The next experiment
Outside her current research, Alraies is exploring a project with her husband, a computer scientist whose work includes cybersecurity and AI. They hope to train a machine-learning model using images of cells under different levels of confinement to predict how cells respond to changing physical conditions.
The approach could eventually reduce the time and resources needed to carry out lab experiments across numerous cell types.
“I think now we cannot limit ourselves to being only biologists or only chemists,” she says. “We need all the fields to work together to make a picture that is as close to real life as possible.”
Alraies hopes eventually to become a professor, combining research with her love of teaching and scientific outreach. She is particularly interested in encouraging younger scientists to remain open to different disciplines.
She also wants young women considering careers in science to know that the pressures of research and life outside the laboratory do not have to close off either one.
“Be like Play-Doh,” she says. “Adapt to the pressure, but keep moving towards what you are passionate about.”