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Eukaryotic cells’ contents are organized into various compartments, including membraneless organelles formed by a process known as liquid-liquid phase separation. Researchers have experimented with creating artificial versions of these compartments to control various aspects of cell biology—blocking particular cellular reactions, for example, or creating new sites for protein translation. Now, a team led by Matthew Good at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine has combined several recent advances into a technique for creating membraneless organelles that reversibly store and release specific intracellular cargo, letting researchers control cell behavior even more finely than before.
To make the organelles, Good’s team engineered yeast (and later human cells) to produce a tweaked version of a protein from the worm C. elegans that would spontaneously coalesce to form droplets, or condensates, in the cell cytoplasm. Then, to mark particular peptides as cargo for these artificial organelles, the researchers ...
