Racing Cargo

Our cells are bustling with traffic. Precious chemicals hurtle down microscopic tracks called microtubules pushed along by motor proteins, millions of times per day. Pictured on the left, a man-made network of red-coloured microtubules looks yellow-ish under a microscope – it’s been loaded with a cargo of green fluorescent proteins. On the right, a burst of chemical energy kick-starts motor proteins, sending the green cargo speeding towards the centre of the picture (bright yellow). This tiny rail system (roughly 1.5 billion times smaller than the London underground) took just seconds to assemble in a tube, using ‘instructions’ encoded in DNA. Self-assembling nanostructures might one day be developed for all sorts of uses, from industrial building materials to placement back inside living tissues, allowing the release of drugs at vulnerable ‘stations’ inside cancerous cells.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image courtesy of Andrew Turberfield, Adam Wollman and colleagues
• University of Oxford
• Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Nanotechnology 2013
• Research published in Nature Nanotechnology, November 2013