@thebiocosmos: Vaults were discovered back in 1986 by 2 scientists: Leonard Rome and his postdoc scientist Nancy Kedersha. Vaults are the largest protein structure made by every cell in your body. In fact, virtually almost every animal cells have thousands of vaults except for a few species such as C.elegans and Drosophila melanogaster (which is also interesting in its own because these also just happen to be our model organisms for most of modern biological research!). Even slime mold has vaults. Interestingly also, a large proportion of plants, bacteria, fungi cells don't have vaults! Vaults are evolutionarily conserved for billions of years. Vaults are about 3 times the mass of ribosomes. Its outer shell is composed of 78 copies of a protein called the Major Vault Protein (MVP) assembled into a barrel shape, which is what you're looking at in the video above. Inside vaults, about 50% is empty space, the other 50% is occupied by two very short pieces of vault RNA (vRNA) sitting at both ends and two other proteins called VPARPs and TEP1s (not shown in the video). Because of how conserved and widespread vaults are, we expected vaults to have such a major function in cells. Yet, for almost 40 years since its discovery, we still know virtually nothing about its true function. We found vault to localise near the nuclear pores, so perhaps they can shuttle things in and out of the nucleus. We found immune cells can have 10 times more vaults than normal cells, so perhaps vaults have some functions in the immune system. Yet, when we delete genes encode for vaults in mice, the animals were virtually fine. So if vaults were so important, it makes no sense that animals lacking vaults would develop normally, yet, the evidence so far seems to be the case. A few have linked vaults to the ability of cancer cells to resist chemotherapy, yet deleting vaults from these cells did not make them more susceptible. (continue in the comment) #cell #biology #Science #research #enigma #chemistry #mystery #PhD #STEM

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Saturday 14 December 2024 17:14:45 GMT