To perform a myriad of functions inside our body's cells, many types of hard-working protein slip into and out of dense droplets called condensates to accelerate biochemical reactions as needed.
"We use a fast camera to record long bright field sequences of images at a high frame rate. This allows us to explore simultaneously fast and slow dynamics ," Shen and colleaguesLike an explosion in the night, you can see the fluorescent green proteins emerge out of the blackness as they aggregate together, appearing to pull more and more proteins out of solution at the condensates' edges until the whole mass seemingly implodes.
frameborder="0″ allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen> If you missed that in the time-lapse video above, watch closely again: it shows the transition from liquid to solid protein starts at the outer edge of the spherical condensate, which thickens and migrates inwards to the core until the whole droplet becomes a solid-like gel.
"This is a huge step forward to understanding how neurogenerative diseases develop from a fundamental perspective,""We can now directly observe the transition of these critical proteins from liquid to solid at the nanoscale – a millionth of a metre in scale,"An illustration of the different stages of protein aggregation, from soluble mixtures to insoluble aggregates.
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