Look Again

Metro maps can be confusing. Sometimes it’d be easier if you could see where each line goes one at a time, and only then layer them all up to see the full network. That’s what has been done in this image of lab-grown bone cancer cells. Each colour shows different structures, such as red mitochondria (cell energy-producers) or green tubulin (part of structural microtubules). The image was made possible by new research that introduces a type of erasable signal – nanobodies that label specific proteins in a cell and can then be removed. That allowed researchers to take a snapshot with one protein labelled, then remove the colour and take another image of the exact same area with a different structure highlighted. Layering these different coloured images shows the full map, showing how the structures interact in healthy and diseased samples.

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 Nikolaos Mougios and colleagues
• Institute of Neuro- and Sensory Physiology, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, October 2024