Buses and Blobs

Just as cities are full of buses – shuttling people around to school, work, play or home – our cells are bustling with tiny transporters that do a similar job. These fluffy-looking balls are zebrafish eggs, stained with a fluorescent dye that reveals these blobby biological buses, known as vesicles, packed with molecules rather than passengers. But there's a key difference between them – the one on the left is normal, while the one on the right is missing a gene called souffle (also known as spastizin), so the vesicles don't form properly. Children born with a faulty version of souffle have a condition known as hereditary spastic paraplegia, where they gradually lose the use of their legs. By understanding how souffle works in model systems like these fish eggs, researchers can start to figure out what's going wrong in the human disease and search for future treatments.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Adapted from image by Roland Dosch and colleagues
• Georg-August Universitaet Goettingen
• Originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Research published in PLOS Genetics, June 2014