Nanorulers serve as essential calibration standards to validate optical super-resolution microscopy down to the Ångström scale. Complementary DNA-, protein-, and virus-based scaffolds provide unique ...

Cell-state diversity drives tissue adaptability, repair, and disease resilience, but capturing this complexity is a challenge. Current approaches rely on transcriptional profiling and overlook organel...

The detailed study of membrane contact sites is challenging owing to their small size and highly dynamic nature. This Review highlights advanced imaging methods and available biosensors that can be us...

Luo et al. describe a budding type of lysosome fission linked to delivery of MFF from mitochondrial-derived vesicles to lysosomes. MFF recruits DRP1 for membrane scission. This axis restores lysosome ...

Plasma membrane lipids are remodeled with age in neural stem cells, and rejuvenating membrane lipids boosts old cell function.

HIV-1 capsid nuclear import at the nuclear pore complex is a bottleneck to resting T cell infection, but HIV-1 overcomes this by triggering receptor-mediated signalling during cell–cell spread to drive nuclear import and licence infection.

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, Published online: 27 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41580-026-00969-xThis Review discusses the unique features of the functionally versatile nuclease Cas12a, including allosteric regulation, structural elements controlling guide RNA maturation, target specificity, cis-cleavage and trans-cleavage activities and determinants of off-target cleavage. These features increase the applicability of Cas12a in biotechnology, therapeutics and molecular diagnostics

CenSpark is a dual-ligand fluorescent probe binding simultaneously inner and outer microtubule sites, a configuration unique to doublet and triplet microtubules, enabling selective live imaging of cen...

International research team presents new imaging technique to make lipids in cellular membranes visible and show how they are organized at the nanoscale.

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, Published online: 19 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41580-026-00957-1Subcellular localization is important for protein function. This Review discusses advances in spatial subcellular proteomics, assesses the strengths and weaknesses of technologies that measure and control protein localization, and considers their potential uses in cell biology and medicine.

Nature - Graduate students increasingly use artificial-intelligence tools to draft, code and search — but many fear it could erode the very skills a doctorate is meant to build.

A modular strategy combining genetic code expansion with a selective amide bond-forming reaction enables the site-specific installation of lysine acylations on folded proteins. Acylboronates react sel...

Researchers simulated nearly every molecule in a bacterial cell — and then watched the cell grow and reproduce.

Improved red and green indicators for norepinephrine and their characterization are reported. These indicators allow detection of norepinephrine release in awake behaving mice in dual-color fiber phot...

Fragments of aberrant cytoplasmic mRNA pair with nuclear RNAs to augment transcription

Clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) is an essential cellular process that needs to operate efficiently across a wide range of conditions. Internali...

AbstractSummary. Lipid–protein interactions play essential roles in cellular signaling and membrane dynamics, yet their systematic characterization has lon

Langstein-Skora, Schmid, Huth et al. propose that intrinsically disordered region functionality can be driven by the interplay between linear binding motifs and contextual chemical characteristics suc...

To ensure that AI advances benefit everyone, scientific institutions must prioritize collaborative, mission-driven structures instead of chasing top talent with astronomical compensation.

Glucose is an important substrate for organisms to acquire energy needed for cellular growth. Despite the importance of this metabolite, single-cell information at a fast time-scale about the dynamics...

Understanding the genetic controls of ageing could lead to more therapies that forestall it.

Hackathons using AlphaGenome and other AI models are hunting down the genetic causes of devastating conditions that have evaded diagnosis.

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, Published online: 15 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41580-025-00945-xLipid droplets have key roles in energy storage and lipid metabolism. This Review discusses tools used for assessing lipid droplet heterogeneity, and how their heterogeneous composition and interactions with other organelles influence physiology and contribute to disease.

Mitochondria that are transported from satellite glial cells in dorsal root ganglia to peripheral sensory neurons through tunneling nanotube-like structures provide protection against peripheral neuropathy.

As biomedical research prioritizes human models and translational promise, classic model organisms are increasingly dismissed. Here we argue that they have a lasting value, both in enabling discovery and in cultivating scientific thinking, by training researchers in systems reasoning, integrative thinking and independent inquiry.

Nature - Systematic analyses of lipid mobilization by human lipid transfer proteins

Coupling an optogenetic lipid-modifying enzyme with proximity labeling reveals protein networks and mechanisms regulating lipid homeostasis in the membranes of target organelles.