Painting Proteins

To understand a huge ecosystem like a rainforest, you might need to watch a few individual species closely: which animal eats which, or how individual trees affect the surrounding area. At the cellular level, countless individual proteins interact in the same way, but these are even harder to track than animals in the jungle. A new protein-labelling approach, called SUM-PAINT, makes it possible, and researchers have created an atlas of brain cells at the level of individual molecules, tracking 30 different types of protein and unravelling the complexity of 900 synapses – junctions between cells. Looking at the whole system and individual brain cells (pictured, with snapshots of 30 proteins overlaid to show the cumulative complexity) the team discovered a new type of synapse, demonstrating a tool that they hope will help reveal hidden details of cell biology, and lead to new treatment approaches for neurodegenerative diseases.

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 Eduard M. Unterauer, Sayedali Shetab Boushehri and Kristina Jevdokimenko, and colleagues
• Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Planegg, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Cell, March 2024