Seeing Contact

Crowded together at a music festival, you bump up against fellow revellers and each nudge of an elbow conveys excitement, annoyance, or camaraderie. Organelles – micro structures within cells – interact with each other in a similar way where their outer edges touch, and exchange messages and material. Researchers visualising these contact points are increasingly using AI to pick apart structures in dense 3D electron microscopy data, but many approaches struggle to define the boundaries between them. A new system refines these results, allowing clear segmentation of different structures and where they meet (pictured, different organelles sequentially hidden and shown in a tissue sample), and helped the team discover a new form of contact from mitochondria called ‘intrusions’, which could act as anchors for contact sites and promote communication, all of which is essential for the processes of regulating energy and responding to stress that can be disrupted in disease.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by by Benjamin S. Padman, Runa S.J. Lindblom & Michael Lazarou
• Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash, Australia
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Journal of Cell Biology, July 2025