Israeli and US scientists have discovered how tiny gateways in human cells control what enters and leaves the cell's nucleus, solving a mystery that has puzzled researchers and could shed new light on cancer, Alzheimer's, and ALS, Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced.

An international team from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) at the University of California, San Francisco, The Rockefeller University, and Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that these gateways use a flexible protein network and special molecular "passports" to move molecules quickly and accurately.

The gateways, called nuclear pore complexes (NPCs), are microscopic structures -- each about one five-hundredth the width of a human hair -- that control all traffic in and out of a cell's nucleus.

"Our model acts like a 'virtual microscope' for something too small and too fast to watch directly with any of today's technologies.

By stitching together many independent experiments and running computer simulations, we can finally watch on the computer how this gate operates moment to moment," the study's lead author, Dr Barak Raveh of Hebrew University, told The Press Service of Israel.

Source:Ndtv