“…The direct involvement of MITF in melanoma proliferation, a highly nutrient-demanding state, strongly suggests that it may also participate in controlling the metabolic landscape by providing both the fuel required for the increased energy consumption of a highly replicative cell, and the metabolic bricks to build new macromolecular structures, such as membrane components and DNA. Similarly, low MITF levels presumably contribute to the establishment of the metabolic profile displayed by slow-cycling cells, as well as the metabolic abnormalities generally associated with therapy-resistance, as recently reviewed by Gonçalves et al, 2021. Given the fact that MITF levels confer phenotypic identity, and that MITF expression is suppressed by environmental and metabolic cues, it is not surprising that melanoma tumors, that are highly phenotypically heterogeneous, comprise different cells expressing variable levels of MITF that dictate their tendency to proliferate or invade (Goodall et al, 2008;Pinner et al, 2009). Since high or low MITF expressing cells very likely display distinctive metabolic features in an MITF-dependent manner, different phenotypic melanoma subsets are likely to respond differently to the same microenvironmental signals.…”