Lipids, or fats, have many functions in our body: they form membrane barriers, store energy or act as messenger substances that regulate cell growth and hormone release.
Many of them are also biomarkers for serious diseases.
So far, it has been very difficult to analyze the functions of these molecules in living cells.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden and the Leibniz Research Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) in Berlin have now developed chemical tools that can be activated by light and that can be used to regulate lipid concentration in living cells.
This approach could enable physicians to work with biochemists to find out what molecules actually do within a cell.
The study was published in the journal PNAS and each cell can produce thousands of different lipids (fats).
However, little is known about how this chemical lipid diversity contributes to the transport of messages within the cell, in other words, the cell’s lipid code is still unknown.
This is mainly due to the lack of methods for the quantitative analysis of lipid function in living cells.
An understanding of how lipids work is very important because they control the function of proteins throughout the cell and are involved in bringing important substances through the cell membrane into the cell.
It is fascinating that only a limited number of lipid classes on the inside of the cell membrane act as messenger molecules, but they receive messages from thousands of different receptor proteins.
It is still unclear how this wealth of messages can still be easily recognized and transmitted. The research groups led by André Nadler at the MPI-CBG and Alexander Walter at the FMP have developed chemical tools in cooperation with the TU Dresden for the concentration of lipids control in living cells.
These tools can be activated by light.
Milena Schuhmacher, the lead author of the study, explains: “Lipids are actually not….
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