Cells manage a wide range of functions in their tiny package — growing, moving, housekeeping, and so on — and most of those functions require energy. But how do cells get this energy in the first ...

In the evolutionary history of life, the ability of a cell to separate its inner world from the external environment was an ...

image: An MIT-led team designed a sensor that may be deployed to screen patients for hard-to-diagnose cancers, or metastatic tumors. The device draws inspiration from the membrane that surrounds all ...

Lipids, or fats, are essential to life. They form the membranes around cells, protecting them from the outside. In nature, there is an enormous diversity of lipids, with each organism having its own ...

Findings from a new University of Cincinnati study have reshaped the fundamental understanding of how a certain cell ...

A study could open new pathways for understanding how cholesterol influences cell membranes and their receptors, paving the way for future research on diseases linked to membrane organization. A new ...

Cholesterol is an essential component of the membrane surrounding every human cell, despite its poor reputation as a health concern when its blood levels are too high. The key to health is having the ...

Researchers have discovered that damage to the cell membrane promotes cellular senescence, or cell aging. Our cells are surrounded by a fragile membrane that's only 5 nanometers thick, 1/20 of a soap ...

Proteins long known to be essential for hearing have been hiding a talent: they also act as gatekeepers that shuffle fatty molecules across cell membranes. When this newly discovered function goes ...

Data from recent studies have led scientists to suspect that caveolae may have a role in buffering changes in cell membrane tension by changing their conformation. Indeed, membrane tension causes ...

(Nanowerk News) Drawing inspiration from natural sensory systems, an MIT-led team has designed a novel sensor that could detect the same molecules that naturally occurring cell receptors can identify.