In this Tools of the Trade article, Yaara Oren describes the development and use of the Watermelon system to simultaneously track the lineage, transcriptional profile and proliferative state of each cancer cell in a population, which enables the characterization of rare cycling persister cells.

This month, Nature Reviews Cancer launches Tools of the Trade articles, in which early career researchers can discuss the methods or techniques that they use to conduct their research.

Crist et al. set out to investigate what makes the colonization of skeletal muscle by disseminated tumour cells (DTCs) so rare and found that this niche enforces persistent oxidative stress on DTCs that cannot be overcome and therefore, restrains their proliferation.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Ana Luísa Correia describes the development and use of a tracker of dormant disseminated tumour cells to investigate the distribution and dynamics of dormant reservoirs within and across distant sites.

In this Tools of the Trade article, Christian Umkehrer describes the development and use of CaTCH, which enables therapy-naive cancer cell clones to be isolated and compared to their resistant counterparts.

Lv, Liu, Mo and colleagues demonstrate that in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cells, gasdermin E transports the transcription factor YBX1 to the nucleus, where it promotes the expression of mucins, thereby providing tumour cells with a barrier against digestive enzymes.