How Secret Conversations Inside Cells Are Transforming Biology
Close to three decades later, Vance’s paper is seen as a landmark — one that has come to transform scientists’ understanding of how cells maintain order and function in their crowded interiors, which buzz with various types of organelles, including mitochondria, nuclei and the ER. In 2009, for example, a team led by Benoît Kornmann, an organelle biologist now at the University of Oxford, UK, identified a group of four proteins that collectively formed a tether between the ER and mitochondria in yeast cells. Mitochondrial biologist Jodi Nunnari at the University of California, Davis, and her then colleague, cell biologist Laura Lackner, classified7 a super-contact zone containing at least two tethers and three organelles — the ER, mitochondria and the plasma membrane.
Source: www.nature.com