For decades, ribosomes have been under the lens of many scientists. Ribosomes are highly sophisticated and complex molecular machines that allow cells to synthesize proteins. However, putting ribosomes together requires intricate assembly processes. While many underlying mechanisms for building ribosomes have been discovered ex situ (outside their native cellular context), our understanding of how ribosomes are assembled in situ has so far remained limited.<\/p>\n
Through a collaboration between the research groups of Christoph M\u00fcller, Sara Cuylen-H\u00e4ring and Julia Mahamid at EMBL Heidelberg, researchers have now pushed these limits. By combining cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) with correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM), they were able to image the nucleolus\u2014the site of ribosome assembly inside cells\u2014at sufficiently high resolution to visualize the ribosome assembly pathway inside intact human cells for the first time.<\/p>\n
The results\u2014a collection of molecular snapshots\u2014yielded subnanometer-resolution in-cell structures of tens of intermediates along the ribosome assembly pathways, complementing and expanding previous insights into ribosome assembly obtained from ex situ structures. The new results have now been published<\/a> in the journal Science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For decades, ribosomes have been under the lens of many scientists. Ribosomes are highly sophisticated and complex molecular machines that allow cells to synthesize proteins. However, putting ribosomes together requires intricate assembly processes. While many underlying mechanisms for building ribosomes have been discovered ex situ (outside their native cellular context), our understanding of how ribosomes [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246189","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\/246189","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}