What is it about?

ROS (reactive oxygen species) are damaging molecules produced in cells, e.g. from imperfect metabolism in mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell. This study shows that artificial organelles, designed to act like sponges, can be swallowed by cells to absorb and neutralize ROS. These internalized organelles then protect cells by reducing ROS levels, even when the cells' natural defenses are weakened.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Elevated levels of harmful oxygen-derived radicals, i.e. ROS, are linked to chronic diseases like fibrosis and neurodegenerative disorders. Boosting our own cellular defenses against these molecules is a promising therapeutic approach and the NRF2 pathway can help cells to manage ROS. This study introduces a new type of artificial nano-organelles into cells that integrates into the cell's own NRF2 response to enhance the ROS defense. This breakthrough is significant in the field of synthetic biology and beyond, where scientists develop new structures to replace or modulate the complex networks in cells for therapeutic purposes.

Perspectives

Writing this article was a great pleasure because it came from a long-term interdisciplinary collaboration between two labs with sufficiently different expertise: material scientists and bioengineers. We believe our findings will interest a wide audience, including chemists and bioengineers studying ROS detection and drug delivery, researchers developing artificial organelles, and biologists focused on classical radical biology. Our work on using nanostructures to target diseased cells and assist endogenous ROS signaling pathways is particularly exciting for the nanomedicine community. Moreover, nanotechnology is a promising field that holds the potential to yield many innovations, significantly impacting human health for the better.

Konstantin Wolf
ETH Zürich, D-CHAB

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Tweaking the NRF2 signaling cascade in human myelogenous leukemia cells by artificial nano-organelles, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2219470121.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page