To view the innards of a cell is to view architecture reminiscent of Antoni Gaudi: the gentle arc of the cell membrane, the contortions of internal tubing, the tight bubbles of vesicles. But for biologists, this architecture is an intellectual puzzle as well as a beautiful structure. Membranes generally prefer to be flat - so what, exactly, is generating all the curves?rnPietro De Camilli thought he had found one answer when, just over a decade ago, he saw a tangle of tubules in an electron micrograph. The pictures came from an experiment carried out by Kohji Takei, De Camilli's postdoc at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Takei had mixed a protein called amphiphysin, which is thickly clustered at the tips of neurons, with large bubbles of artificial membranes to try to replay the process by which neurotransmitter chemicals are packaged up. It came as a surprise when the membranes snapped into masses of jumbled, twisted tubes'. "It looked like a plate of spaghetti, it was absolutely spectacular," says De Camilli. "It was the first example of a protein that, by itself, had dramatic membrane-deforming properties," he says.
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机译：要查看细胞的内部结构，就要查看让人联想到安东尼高迪的建筑：细胞膜的柔和弧度，内部管道的扭曲，囊泡的紧密气泡。但是对于生物学家来说，这种结构既是智力难题，又是美丽的结构。膜通常更喜欢平坦-到底是什么在生成所有曲线？rn皮埃特罗·德·卡米利（Pietro De Camilli）认为，十年前，当他在电子显微照片中看到一团小管时，他找到了一个答案。图片来自De Camilli的博士后Kohji Takei在康涅狄格州纽黑文的耶鲁大学进行的实验。武井将一种叫做两亲蛋白的蛋白质混合在一起，这种蛋白质在神经元的尖端密集地聚集在一起，并与大的人造膜气泡混合，以尝试重放包装神经递质化学物质的过程。当膜突然变成一团混乱的扭曲管子时，这真是令人惊讶。德卡米利说：“它看起来像一盘意大利面，绝对是壮观。”他说：“这是蛋白质本身具有戏剧性的膜变形特性的第一个例子。”
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