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A new study shows how the cells can consume things around them.
"Just like our eating habits shape anything in our body, the way cells'eat' matters for the health of the cells," said Kural, an associate professor of physics at The Ohio State University. Scientists didn't understand the mechanics of how that happened.
A study published last month in the journal Developmental Cell found that the intercellular machinery of a cell assembles into a basket-like structure that eventually grows into a closed cage. Scientists had thought that the structure began as a flat lattice.
Kural said that the formation of the pockets that carry substances into and out of a cell is controlled by the shape of the Membrane.
Small sacs one-one millionth the size of a red blood cell are formed by the pockets that capture substances around the cell. Important things for a cell's health are carried by vesicles. They can be hijacked by pathogens.
The question of how those pockets formed from the same material as before had been a problem for researchers for over 40 years.
It was a controversy in cellular studies. We were able to answer the question of how they are created by using super-resolution fluorescent images to watch the pockets form within live cells.
"Simply put, we made high-resolution movies of cells instead of taking snapshots," Kural said. Our experiments show that the underlying membrane is damaged when the scaffolds are recruited to the sites of vesicle formation.
Previous theories had it that the scaffolds of a cell had to go through an energy intensive reorganization to curve.
The way cells consume and excrete is important for living organisms. The process clears bad cholesterol from the blood. Cancer and Alzheimer's disease are two diseases in which the process breaks down.
Understanding the origin and dynamics of the conjugates is important because they can be utilized for delivering drugs for therapeutic purposes, but at the same time, hijacked by pathogens. Our results matter more than our understanding of the basics of life, but also for developing better therapeutic strategies.
The study was co-authored by Emanuele Cocucci, an assistant professor in Ohio State's College of Pharmacy.
The De novo endocytic clathrin coats develop curvature at early stages of their formation. There is an article in the journal, titled, "Decel.2021.10.019."
The journal contains information about the cell.
High-resolution lab experiments show how cells eat.
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