Your body is teeming with mysterious particles called vaults. With an average of 10,000 to 100,000 of them in every human cell, they’re thought to be one of the most abundant particles in the body. But no one knows their function.
This mystery doesn’t phase the discoverer of vaults, University of California, Los Angeles cell biologist Leonard Rome. To him, what matters about vaults is not what they do naturally in the body, but what they can do. Vaults’ structure, he says—three proteins and a small RNA molecule assembled in a hollow, barrel-like shape—makes them the perfect nanoscale delivery vehicle to encapsulate and carry therapeutic drugs or genes.
Rome’s lab first encountered vaults almost 25 years ago while studying lysosomal enzymes. In electron microscopy scans of coated vesicles, which shuttle the enzymes through the cytoplasm, postdoc Nancy Kedersha ...
