New Method Reads a Cell’s Genes Without Killing It
Ben Sullivan
Every few minutes, a living cell does something quietly extraordinary: it sheds tiny membrane bubbles into the fluid around it. These extracellular vesicles carry molecular cargo (proteins, lipids, fragments of RNA) and cells have been doing this for so long that biologists spent decades trying to understand what the bubbles were for. A team at the Technical University of Munich has now turned that ancient cellular habit into something useful. They have engineered a way to load those bubbles...