Vaults

8 months ago I was marveling at the mysterious vaults that abound inside our cells (lnkd.in/guUpVb4p), which we still don't much about. But just because we don't really know what they are supposed to do does not mean we can't divert them for other purposes.

Yu-Kai Chao, Michelle Wu , Qiyu Gong and Fei Chen of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard developed a super clever "temporal recorder" by leveraging engineered vaults, which they call TimeVaults. TimeVaults capture mRNA through poly(A) binding protein and "store" the transcriptome living cells for over 7 days, with stability, high fidelity and minimal perturbations to the cell. This temporal recorder provides a time-based image of how a cell responds to perturbations. That's the kind of tool that can radically improve our understanding of how cells work.

The Science Magazine article is, sadly, behind a paywall (A genetically encoded device for transcriptome storage in mammalian cells, lnkd.in/gAyJP4wq), but Yu-Kai Chao created a great NotebookLM video: lnkd.in/ga6CsBsJ