Unprecedented resolution reveals molecular details
Like humans, cells use machines to carry out the complicated tasks they are confronted with, such as chromosome segregation. These molecular machines are often as elaborate as human-made devices, but exactly how they work is much harder to understand because of their extremely small size. While an engineer could study a human-made machine relatively easily or take it apart to figure out how it works, a molecular machine is typically only a ten thousandth of a millimetre in size. That has made it incredibly difficult for scientists to understand how these molecules work.
“If one could actually look at molecular machines, it would be much easier to understand how they work,” explains IMP-director Jan-Michael Peters. Exactly that has now become possible with new techniques for generating synthetic forms of these molecular machines. The new technology, developed recently at the IMP, makes it possible to test how these complex molecules function by manipulating them systematically. Add to this a new electron microscopy technique that brings resolution down to the atomic level — and indeed scientists are now able to directly look at these machines. For this purpose, they are first frozen at very low temperatures and then analysed with electron beams that can be measured with new detectors of unprecedented precision. With these approaches, machines built of tiny protein molecules can now be visualised, even though they are less than a hundredth of a human hair in diameter.
Molecular complex switches itself on
The teams of Brenda Schulman, Holger Stark and Jan-Michael Peters have applied these approaches to visualise a molecular machine called the APC/C. “APC/C initiates chromosome segregation and it does this only after the mother cell has completed all other steps that are necessary for cell division. We knew all of this, because otherwise daughter cells with the wrong chromosome numbers would be born — with catastrophic consequences,” explains Jan-Michael Peters, “But we did not know how the APC/C is switched on at the right time.”
The work of Brenda Schulman, Holger Stark and Jan-Michael Peters has now directly visualised the APC/C machine before and after it is switched on. “Interestingly, this revealed that the APC/C can switch itself on, like a smart hybrid car knows when to switch from the electric to the gas engine or vice versa,” says Brenda Schulman. “Without directly being able to see the APC/C in detail by electron microscopy, we would have never been able to find out,” adds Holger Stark. “In the future, the new technology will allow us to visualise and understand molecular processes at a level we could so far only dream of.” In the long run, the scientists hope that their work will help to understand how errors in chromosome segregation and the diseases and syndromes caused by them can be prevented.