{"id":165430,"date":"2023-06-09T07:22:24","date_gmt":"2023-06-09T12:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/powerful-microscope-captures-motor-proteins-in-unprecedented-detail"},"modified":"2023-06-09T07:22:24","modified_gmt":"2023-06-09T12:22:24","slug":"powerful-microscope-captures-motor-proteins-in-unprecedented-detail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/powerful-microscope-captures-motor-proteins-in-unprecedented-detail","title":{"rendered":"Powerful microscope captures motor proteins in unprecedented detail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/powerful-microscope-captures-motor-proteins-in-unprecedented-detail2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Almost as soon as there were super-resolution microscopes, scientists pointed them towards molecular motors called kinesins. These proteins, powered by the molecular fuel ATP, drive crucial processes including cell division, cell signalling and intracellular transport by shuttling cargo along protein highways called microtubules. Researchers have long wanted to understand how these motors work, but to visualize them, scientists have had to slow them down or isolate them in simplified, <i>in<\/i> <i>vitro<\/i> systems.<\/p>\n<p>Now, in papers published concurrently in <i>Science<\/i>, two teams working independently have used a super-resolution tool called MINFLUX to study the motor in near-real time at physiologically relevant concentrations of ATP. The first paper, led by MINFLUX\u2019s inventor, Stefan Hell, who has a joint appointment at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary <i>Science<\/i>s in G\u00f6ttingen and the MPI for Medical Research in Heidelberg, both in Germany, used a new instrument design to track the protein in 3D, revealing details about its motion<sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-023-01906-0#ref-CR1\">1<\/a><\/sup>. The second, led by biophysicist Jonas Ries at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, showed for the first time that MINFLUX is capable of tracking kinesin even amid the bustle of living cells<sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-023-01906-0#ref-CR2\">2<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis technology requires a lot of different things to work, and it\u2019s fun to see all of these things coming together,\u201d says Michelle Digman, a biomedical engineer at the University of California, Irvine, who develops imaging strategies but was not involved in either study. \u201cIt seemed like a proof of concept to show that they\u2019re able to track kinesin very precisely. And when you have the live cell system, that\u2019s even more spectacular.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Almost as soon as there were super-resolution microscopes, scientists pointed them towards molecular motors called kinesins. These proteins, powered by the molecular fuel ATP, drive crucial processes including cell division, cell signalling and intracellular transport by shuttling cargo along protein highways called microtubules. Researchers have long wanted to understand how these motors work, but to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-nanotechnology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}