Monday, January 22, 2007

Have you ever looked at the membrane that wraps around our cells through a laboratory microscope? Do you have any idea how it looks like? Well, I know that the membrane is choc-a-bloc full of proteins, but unfortunately we can't see them directly. It happens because the level of detail is too small for our research microscopes to look at, without destroying the cell. Do you think there is a way we can reconstruct the mosaic of proteins that normally stud a membrane? In "Molecular Anatomy of a Trafficking Organelle", Shigeo Takamori and his co-workers studied the synaptic. They learned that the synaptic vesicles are dominated by proteins. Takamori together with his co-workers determined the precise composition of all the proteins that float in the membrane of the synaptic vesicle. With this information, they built this delightful model of a synaptic vesicle.