Data availability
All data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary files. Source data generated in this study are provided in the Supplementary Information/Source Data file. Source data is available for Figs. 2–8 and Supplementary Figs. 1, 4–18, 20–22 in the associated source data file. Any additional requests for information can be directed to, and will be fulfilled by, the corresponding authors. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (22477056 to Y. Song, 82472379 to B. He, and 82572370 to Y. Gao), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2019YFA0709200 to Y. Song), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2024300315 to Y. Song), Jiangsu Provincial Medical Key Discipline Cultivation Unit (JSDW202239 to B. He), the Jiangsu Provincial Key Research and Development Program (BE2021373, China to Y. Song), the State Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Life Science (5431ZZXM2304 to Y. Song). The graphical abstract in Figs. 1, 2a, g, 4a, 5a, 6a, 7a, 8a, Supplementary Fig. 7a and Supplementary Fig. 22a was created using BioRender. Luo, W. (https://BioRender.com/l1e6nxj). Herein, the authors would like to give sincere thanks to Dr. Shang Cai (Westlake University), who had kindly provided intratumor bacteria as a generous gift.
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Competing interests
Y.S. and W.L. are inventors on a patent application (number of patent application, 202511249032.X) filed by Nanjing University related to this work. The other authors declare no competing interests.
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Luo, W., Gao, Y., Feng, S. et al. A Mechanophenotyping chip for high-throughput detection of metastatic bacteria-infected circulating tumor cells. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68152-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68152-y
