Multi-lab collaboration yields first detailed map of nuclear pore complex

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A finished pore. The researchers decade-long study led to renderings of a huge 450-protein complex that serves as a gatekeeper to a cells nucleus. (Image courtesy Nature.)
A finished pore. The researchers’ decade-long study led to renderings of a huge 450-protein complex that serves as a gatekeeper to a cell’s nucleus. (Image courtesy Nature.)

A cell’s membrane-bound nucleus contains precious contents — its DNA — so it must be very careful about what enters and leaves this important space. To do this, it uses hundreds to thousands of nuclear pores as its gatekeepers, selective membrane channels that are responsible for regulating the material that goes to and from a cell’s DNA and the signals that tell a cell what to do and how to do it.


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