For decades biochemists have been teasing apart the metabolic circuits that power eukaryotic cells. Their descriptions of how enzymes work and play together have illuminated everything from carbohydrate metabolism to DNA replication. Yet technical limitations have forced these scientists to record the behavior not of individual proteins in single cells, but of populations of proteins in millions of cells. The result is an average, idealized description of intracellular behavior, which is the functional equivalent of trying to understand what a group of people is thinking by listening to the roar of a crowd.
Recognizing that shortcoming, a new breed of biochemist is now embracing the single-cell approach. Armed with new electrophoretic and fiber-optic methods, they are asking questions at the cellular level that were previously impossible, and discovering new insights into the behavior of cells along the way.
Norman Dovichi, professor of chemistry at the University of Washington, Seattle, has ...
