Mapping the living cell
To get a clear picture of what’s happening inside a cell, scientists need to know the locations of thousands of proteins and other molecules. MIT chemists have now developed a technique that can tag all of the proteins in a particular region of a cell, allowing them to more accurately map those proteins.“That’s a holy grail for biology — to be able to get spatially and temporally resolved molecular maps of living cells,” says Alice Ting, the Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor of Chemistry at MIT. “We’re still really far from that goal, but the overarching motivation is to get closer to that goal.”Ting’s new method, developed with researchers from the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical School, combines the strengths of two existing techniques — microscopic imaging and mass spectrometry — to tag proteins in a specific cell location and generate a comprehensive list of all the proteins in that...