A team at ETH Zurich’s Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering in Basel, led by Professor Randall Platt, has developed a system that archives a cell’s RNA for several days. This makes it possible to reconstruct which genes were active in the past. The study was published in Nature Biotechnology.
The system uses three optimised proteins, one derived from a stress granule protein, which concentrate RNA in a film around the mitochondria and protect it from enzymes that would destroy it. Each cell can store several thousand RNA molecules.
In human cell cultures, the archive captured responses to an immune signalling molecule that conventional measurements taken later would miss. ETH has filed a patent and the team plans animal studies and cancer research, such as isolating tumour cells that survive chemotherapy to understand how they form.
