NEWS FEATURE 11 MARCH 2019
How secret conversations inside cells are transforming biology
Organelles — the cell’s workhorses — mingle far more than scientists ever appreciated.
Illustration by Serge Bloch
Elie Dolgin
Nobody paid much attention to Jean Vance 30 years ago, when she discovered something fundamental about the building blocks inside cells. She even doubted herself, at first.
The revelation came after a series of roadblocks. The cell biologist had just set up her laboratory at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and was working alone. She thought she had isolated a pure batch of structures called mitochondria — the power plants of cells — from rat livers. But tests revealed that her sample contained something that wasn’t supposed to be there. “I thought I’d made a big mistake,” Vance recalls.
After additional purification steps, she found extra bits of the cells’ innards clinging to mitochondria like wads of chewing gum stuck to a shoe. The interlopers were part of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) — an assembly line for proteins and fatty molecules. Other biologists had seen this, too, and dismissed it as an artefact of the preparation. But Vance realized that the pieces were glued together for a reason, and that this could solve one of cell biology’s big mysteries.
In a 1990 paper, Vance showed that the meeting points between the ER and mitochondria were crucibles for the synthesis of lipids1. By bringing the two organelles together, these junctions could serve as portals for the transfer of newly made fats. This would answer the long-standing question of how mitochondria receive certain lipids — they are directly passed from the ER.
Yet most of her contemporaries, schooled in the idea that the gummy bits of ER were nothing more than contamination, doubted that such unions were important to cells. “I gave several presentations,” says Vance, “and people were sceptical.”
Not any more. Close to three decades later, Vance’s paper is seen as a landmark — one that has come to transform scientists’ understanding of how cells maintain order and function in their crowded interiors, which buzz with various types of organelles, including mitochondria, nuclei and the ER. Researchers now recognize that interactions between organelles are ubiquitous, with almost every type coming into close conversation with every other type. Probing those connections is also leading biologists to discover proteins that are responsible for holding the organelles together and maintaining a healthy cell.
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FREE PDF GRATIS: Nature
FREE PDF GRATIS: Nature
https://www.nature.com/magazine-assets/d41586-019-00792-9/d41586-019-00792-9.pdf
