With the flick of a switch: Shaping cells with light

Imagine switching on a light and being able to understand and control the inner dynamics of a cell. This is what the Dimova group has achieved: by shining lights of different colors on replicates of cells, they altered the ...

New production process for therapeutic nanovesicles

Particles known as extracellular vesicles play a vital role in communication between cells and in many cell functions. Released by cells into their environment, these "membrane particles" consist of a cellular membrane carrying ...

Division and growth of synthetic vesicles

One big challenge for the production of synthetic cells is that they must be able to divide to have offspring. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a team from Heidelberg has now introduced a reproducible division mechanism ...

How cellular fingertips may help cells 'speak' to each other

What if you found out that you could heal using only a finger? It sounds like science fiction, reminiscent of the 1982 movie "E.T." Well, it turns out that your body's own cells can do something similarly unexpected. Researchers ...

Message in a bottle: Info-rich bubbles respond to antibiotics

Once regarded as merely cast-off waste products of cellular life, bacterial membrane vesicles (MVs) have since become an exciting new avenue of research, due to the wealth of biological information they carry to other bacteria ...

Not as simple as thought: How bacteria form membrane vesicles

Researchers from the University of Tsukuba identified a novel mechanism by which bacteria form membrane vesicles, which bacteria employ to communicate with each other or to defend themselves against antibiotics. By studying ...

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