Protein filaments allow ‘diary’ of cell events to be read

The critical reputation of French-American writer Anaïs Nin has fluctuated over the years, but she certainly advertised the benefits of keeping a diary. When hers was published in 1966, it made her a literary star. ‘It was while writing a Diary that I discovered how to capture the living moments’, she attested. 

Capturing the living moments of cells by the creation of molecular diaries has now become a cottage industry. The motive is clear: we can only understand biology properly as a dynamic process, a constant cellular conversation mediated by molecules. This chatter generally involves the switching on and off of genes, regulated through complex networks of interaction and signalling. ‘The real “raw material” of the human body’, writes oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee in his new book The Song of the Cell, ‘is not [static] information but the way that information is enlivened, decoded, transformed, and integrated… by cells.’