Transport of Delight

Just like a postal service relies on roads and trucks to collect and deliver letters and packages, the cells in our bodies have a complex transport network that moves molecules wherever they need to go. Nowhere is this more challenging than in nerve cells, which are covered with long spindly branches known as dendrites. Within each dendrite are ‘roads’ made of bundles of thin microtubules, like the ones in these images of a rat nerve cell dendrite. The ‘trucks’ are motor proteins, travelling along the microtubule highways as they collect and deliver their molecular cargo. Microtubules can be chemically modified in different ways, which affects how stable they are and the kinds of motor proteins that run along them. By using a new high-powered microscopy technique, researchers are now able to visualise these different types of microtubules, creating a detailed ‘road map’ of the transport network inside nerve cells.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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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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• Image from work by Eugene A Katrukha and colleagues
• Cell Biology, Neurobiology and Biophysics, Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, July 2021