High resolution showing how cells "eat"

"Just like our eating habits shape basically everything in our body, the way cells'eat' is also related to the health of cells," said Ke, associate professor of physics at Ohio State University and lead author of the study.

The study, published last month in the journal Developmental Cell, found that the cell’s intercellular machinery assembles into a highly curved basket-like structure and eventually grows into a closed cage

Kural says that membrane curvature is important: it controls the formation of pockets that carry materials in and out of the cell

The sac traps the material around the cell, forms around the extracellular material, and then becomes a vesicle—a small vesicle that is one millionth the size of a red blood cell

However, how these pockets are formed from thin films previously thought to be flat has plagued researchers for nearly 40 years

"This is a controversy in cell research," Kural said

"To put it simply, compared to previous studies, we took high-resolution shots of cells instead of taking snapshots," Kural said

This is in sharp contrast to the previous hypothesis, which believed that the protein scaffold of the cell must undergo an energy-intensive reorganization to bend the cell membrane

The way cells consume and expel vesicles plays a key role in the organism

Kural said: "It is important to understand the origin and dynamics of membrane-bound vesicles-they can be used for drug delivery, but they can also be hijacked by viruses and other pathogens to enter and infect cells

Nathan M.