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The Biophysical World Inside a Jam-Packed Cell

拥挤细胞内的生物物理世界
2026-02-18  ·  Quanta Magazine  ·  原文

How thick is cell cytoplasm?

细胞的细胞质有多厚?

Its crowdedness reflects the health and growth of a cell.

它的拥挤程度反映了细胞的健康和生长。

It’s a familiar image, reprinted in countless biology textbooks: an illustration of a typical cell, halved like a grapefruit to reveal its innards.

这是一个熟悉的图像,在无数的生物学教科书中重印:一个典型细胞的插图,像葡萄柚一样切成两半,露出它的内部结构。

Strands of endoplasmic reticulum encircle a nucleus that floats in the center like a raft.

内质网束环绕着一个像木筏一样漂浮在中心的细胞核。

RNA molecules wait patiently at ribosomes to deliver recipes for making proteins.

RNA 分子在核糖体处耐心等待,以提供制造蛋白质的配方。

A few vacuoles and Golgi bodies bob about.

一些液泡和高尔基体在晃动。

A mostly deserted cytosol offers a blank backdrop.

几乎荒芜的细胞质提供了一个空白的背景。

These are scenes of a calm, rarefied order, as if a cell were a tidy factory with workers individually going about their focused tasks.

这些场景呈现出一种平静、稀有的秩序,就好像牢房是一座整洁的工厂,工人们各自专注于自己的任务。

Scrub that picture from your mind right now: Cells are anything but calm or rarefied.

现在就把这幅画面从你的脑海中抹去:细胞一点也不平静或稀薄。

If you were trapped inside a cell, you would feel like a dancer in a thronged nightclub, constantly jostled by neighbors.

如果你被困在牢房里,你会感觉自己像一个拥挤的夜总会里的舞者,不断受到邻居的推挤。

Over the past few years, thanks to stunning advances in imaging and genetic engineering, scientists have been able to observe and measure crowding inside cells in living organisms for the first time.

在过去的几年里,得益于成像和基因工程方面的惊人进步,科学家们首次能够观察和测量活体细胞内的拥挤情况。

The experiments have revealed a more dynamic and crowded place than anyone expected, and are the latest evidence that cells actively regulate their internal crowdedness to optimize for the chemical reactions required for life.

这些实验揭示了一个比任何人预期的更加动态和拥挤的地方,并且是细胞主动调节其内部拥挤度以优化生命所需的化学反应的最新证据。

Far from being a biophysical accident, the packing of molecules into tiny spaces is emerging as a fundamental way that cells have evolved to harness physics to bring molecules together for the estimated 1 billion biochemical reactions that occur every second in every cell of our bodies.

将分子堆积到微小空间中绝非生物物理事故,而是细胞进化的一种基本方式,利用物理学将分子聚集在一起,以进行估计每秒在我们身体的每个细胞中发生的 10 亿次生化反应。

The cell biologist Liam Holt pioneered a method that combines genetic engineering and fluorescence microscopy to trace ribosome-size molecules moving through a cell.

细胞生物学家利亚姆·霍尔特(Liam Holt)首创了一种结合基因工程和荧光显微镜来追踪核糖体大小的分子在细胞中移动的方法。

“If you’re in a bar or nightclub that’s not very crowded, you might not talk to anyone or dance with anyone,” said Liam Holt , a cell biologist at New York University Langone Health.

纽约大学朗格健康中心的细胞生物学家利亚姆·霍尔特说:“如果你在不太拥挤的酒吧或夜总会,你可能不会与任何人交谈或与任何人跳舞。”

“But at midnight when the bar is jam-packed, you’re more likely to talk or dance with someone next to you.

“但在午夜,当酒吧挤满了人时,你更有可能与旁边的人交谈或跳舞。

But if you see someone across the room, it’s harder to get to them.”

但如果你看到房间对面有人,就很难找到他们。”

The new findings are confounding scientists’ expectations, raising questions about how exactly molecules can encounter their reactive partners in a teeming, crowded space — and therefore how cells can possibly function.

这些新发现出乎了科学家们的预期,引发了人们的疑问:分子究竟如何在拥挤的空间中遇到它们的反应伙伴,从而引发细胞如何发挥作用。

Cells may be biological entities, but they are not exempt from the laws of physics.

细胞可能是生物实体,但它们并不能免受物理定律的约束。

In his 1944 book What Is Life?

在他 1944 年出版的《生命是什么?》一书中

The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell , the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that living things, like their nonliving counterparts, must submit to governance by physical laws.

在《活细胞的物理方面》一书中,量子物理学家欧文·薛定谔认为,生物和非生物一样,必须服从物理定律的支配。

His vision has inspired biology-minded physicists and physics-minded biologists ever since.

从那时起,他的愿景一直激励着具有生物学头脑的物理学家和具有物理学头脑的生物学家。

But studying the physics of eukaryotic cells — the kind that make up our bodies and those of other multicellular organisms — presented a challenge: How do you study an individual cell buried deep within the body of a person, a mouse, or even a simple worm?

但是,研究真核细胞(构成我们身体和其他多细胞生物体的细胞)的物理学提出了一个挑战:如何研究深埋在人、小鼠甚至简单蠕虫体内的单个细胞?

Not everyone agrees on the best way to study the biophysics of cells.

并非所有人都同意研究细胞生物物理学的最佳方法。

I n the world of cells, the word “crowding” doesn’t have a clear physical definition.

在细胞世界中,“拥挤”这个词没有明确的物理定义。

That’s why Simone Reber , a biochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, focuses on a simpler, older, and more precisely defined physical quantity: density, the mass of a cell’s contents divided by its volume.

这就是为什么马克斯·普朗克感染生物学研究所的生物化学家西蒙娜·雷伯(Simone Reber)专注于一个更简单、更古老、定义更精确的物理量:密度,即细胞内容物的质量除以其体积。

Recently, Reber’s team used light refraction to infer cells’ densities, finding that the densities of cells from various species — frogs, worms, yeast, bacteria, fruit flies, zebra fish, and humans — ranged widely.

最近,雷伯的团队利用光折射来推断细胞密度,发现青蛙、蠕虫、酵母、细菌、果蝇、斑马鱼和人类等不同物种的细胞密度差异很大。

And yet, surprisingly, the nucleus was almost exactly 80% as dense as the cytoplasm across all species.

然而,令人惊讶的是,所有物种的细胞核密度几乎都是细胞质的 80%。

Both Liam Holt’s studies on crowding and Reber’s on density have uncovered physical quantities that apply across cell types, suggesting it’s a property that “the cell is very actively regulating,” Holt said.

利亚姆·霍尔特(Liam Holt)关于拥挤的研究和雷伯(Reber)关于密度的研究都发现了适用于各种细胞类型的物理量,这表明“细胞正在非常积极地调节”这一特性,霍尔特说。

He has given the nanoparticles he uses in his studies to Reber, who plans to test whether her team’s density metric correlates with Holt’s crowding.

他将他在研究中使用的纳米粒子交给了雷伯,雷伯计划测试她的团队的密度指标是否与霍尔特的拥挤相关。

She sees “no conflict” between crowding and density, she said.

她说,她认为拥挤和密度之间“不存在冲突”。

“They’re happily coexisting.” —G.P.

“他们相处得很愉快。” —G.P.

At first, scientists got around this problem by removing those cells from humans and animals and growing them in test tubes or petri dishes.

起初,科学家通过从人类和动物身上取出这些细胞并将其培养在试管或培养皿中来解决这个问题。

Early studies hinted that cells are subject to a Goldilocks phenomenon: They function best when their cytoplasm — everything enclosed by a cell’s membrane, including organelles, molecular structures such as ribosomes, and the gel-like cytosol and its dissolved molecules — has some level of crowding, but not too much.

早期研究暗示,细胞会出现金发姑娘现象:当细胞质(细胞膜包围的所有东西,包括细胞器、核糖体等分子结构、凝胶状细胞质及其溶解的分子)有一定程度的拥挤时,它们的功能最佳,但不会太多。

In the 1980s, a team of researchers found that if they diluted the cytoplasm extracted from frog eggs even a little bit, vital biochemical reactions such as mitosis and DNA replication ceased.

20 世纪 80 年代,一组研究人员发现,如果他们将从青蛙卵中提取的细胞质稀释一点点,有丝分裂和 DNA 复制等重要的生化反应就会停止。

Other studies found that overcrowding could be equally disastrous, causing the chemical machinery of life to freeze up.

其他研究发现,过度拥挤也可能造成同样的灾难,导致生命的化学机器冻结。

Cells are constantly churning through energy to stir things up, keep the cytosol fluid, and encourage molecules to collide and react more often than they would through simple diffusion.

细胞不断地搅动能量来搅动事物,保持细胞质流体,并促使分子比简单扩散更频繁地碰撞和反应。

Even so, cellular life appears to balance on a knife’s edge.

即便如此,细胞生命似乎仍处于危险边缘。

If cells were any less crowded, molecules would wander aimlessly and only rarely encounter their partner (or partners) in the chemical reactions that power life — metabolism, protein synthesis, growth, division, and more.

如果细胞不那么拥挤,分子就会漫无目的地游荡,并且很少会在为生命提供动力的化学反应中遇到它们的伙伴(或多个伙伴)——新陈代谢、蛋白质合成、生长、分裂等等。

In that situation, cellular life would wither.

在这种情况下,细胞生命就会枯萎。

If, on the other hand, cells were much more crowded, molecules would be stuck in place, unable to move much at all, let alone come across their reaction partners.

另一方面,如果细胞更加拥挤,分子就会被困在原地,根本无法移动,更不用说遇到它们的反应伙伴了。

Life would grind to a halt.

生活将陷入停滞。

Evolution seemed to have struck a delicate balance between over- and undercrowding, with large molecules such as ribosomes typically representing between 30% and 40% of the volume of dissolved macromolecules in the cytosol, Holt said.

霍尔特说,进化似乎在过度拥挤和拥挤之间取得了微妙的平衡,核糖体等大分子通常占细胞质中溶解大分子体积的 30% 到 40%。

“It seems that much of biology is tuned to have a very similar level of crowding.” But to confirm this view, researchers would need to find a way to track molecules moving through a cell.

“看来生物学的大部分都被调整为具有非常相似的拥挤程度。”但为了证实这一观点,研究人员需要找到一种方法来追踪分子在细胞中的移动。

They would need a tracer of the right size.

他们需要尺寸合适的示踪剂。

Crowding is relative.

拥挤是相对的。

While a person might have trouble moving through Holt’s imagined club at midnight, a cat or mouse would not find it too crowded to navigate.

虽然一个人在午夜穿过霍尔特想象中的俱乐部可能会遇到困难,但猫或老鼠不会觉得这里太拥挤而无法导航。

To study crowding in cells, biologists needed a proxy molecule in the same size range — a tracer roughly as large as the large molecules involved in most cellular reactions.

为了研究细胞中的拥挤情况,生物学家需要一种尺寸范围相同的代理分子——一种与大多数细胞反应中涉及的大分子大致一样大的示踪剂。

In the mid-2010s, Holt introduced genetically encoded multimeric nanoparticles, or GEMs, which are naturally occurring spherical proteins about 40 nanometers in diameter — around the same size as ribosomes, the molecular machines that build proteins.

2010 年代中期,霍尔特推出了基因编码的多聚纳米颗粒(GEM),它们是天然存在的球形蛋白质,直径约为 40 纳米,与核糖体(构建蛋白质的分子机器)大小大致相同。

Using genetic engineering, researchers can decorate the surfaces of GEMs with glowing green fluorescent tags and then track their movements through a cell’s cytoplasm under a microscope.

利用基因工程,研究人员可以用发光的绿色荧光标签装饰 GEM 的表面,然后在显微镜下跟踪它们在细胞质中的运动。

In 2018, this approach gave Holt and his colleagues fresh insight into how cells manage their crowdedness.

2018 年,这种方法让霍尔特和他的同事对细胞如何管理其拥挤度有了新的认识。

They put GEMs inside yeast and human cells in culture and measured how long it took the particles to percolate through different areas of the cell.

他们将 GEM 放入培养的酵母和人类细胞内,并测量颗粒渗透到细胞不同区域所需的时间。

Strangely, in cells grown under different nutritional conditions, the crowding of the entire cell seemed to change.

奇怪的是,在不同营养条​​件下生长的细胞中,整个细胞的拥挤程度似乎发生了变化。

“This led me to ask what was going on,” Holt said.

“这让我想知道发生了什么事,”霍尔特说。

He suspected that mTORC1 was involved.

他怀疑 mTORC1 参与其中。

The main nutrient sensor in eukaryotic cells, mTORC1 is a master regulator of cell growth; based on nutrient levels, it can boost production of ribosomes to build more proteins faster.

mTORC1 是真核细胞中主要的营养传感器,是细胞生长的主要调节因子;根据营养水平,它可以促进核糖体的产生,从而更快地构建更多蛋白质。

“The rate at which organisms can grow is fundamentally limited by how many ribosomes they can produce,” Holt said.

“生物体生长的速度从根本上受到它们可以产生的核糖体数量的限制,”霍尔特说。

Indeed, when his team chemically suppressed mTORC1, the concentration of ribosomes decreased, and GEMs flowed through the cytoplasm much more easily.

事实上,当他的团队用化学方法抑制 mTORC1 时,核糖体的浓度降低,GEM 更容易流经细胞质。

Holt’s GEM nanoparticles glow green as they move around in the cytoplasm of a human pancreatic cell grown in culture.

Holt 的 GEM 纳米颗粒在培养物中生长的人类胰腺细胞的细胞质中移动时会发出绿光。

(Magenta is actin, a cytoskeletal protein; blue is DNA, indicating the nucleus.)

(洋红色是肌动蛋白,一种细胞骨架蛋白;蓝色是 DNA,表示细胞核。)

Further experiments suggested that cells can use ribosomes — one of the most abundant molecules in a cell — and the genetic pathways that regulate them to control their molecular crowds.

进一步的实验表明,细胞可以使用核糖体(细胞中最丰富的分子之一)以及调节核糖体的遗传途径来控制其分子群。

Holt calls mTORC1 “a dynamic control knob for cytoplasmic physical properties.”

Holt 将 mTORC1 称为“细胞质物理特性的动态控制旋钮”。

Holt’s team’s work on how cells manage their internal environment inspired further experiments.

霍尔特团队关于细胞如何管理其内部环境的工作启发了进一步的实验。

The paper, now cited almost 500 times, was “incredibly influential,” said Arohan Subramanya , a cell biologist at the University of Pittsburgh.

匹兹堡大学细胞生物学家阿罗汉·苏布拉马尼亚 (Arohan Subramanya) 表示,这篇论文现已被引用近 500 次,“具有难以置信的影响力”。

Holt showed that “ribosomes act as natural crowding agents.”

霍尔特表明“核糖体充当天然的拥挤剂”。

The result is a biochemical system in which the crowdedness of the cytoplasm reflects a cell’s growth and health, Holt said.

霍尔特说,其结果是形成了一个生化系统,其中细胞质的拥挤程度反映了细胞的生长和健康状况。

“If organisms are growing quickly and in perfect conditions, they pack their cytoplasm with a very high concentration of ribosomes.”

“如果生物体在完美的条件下快速生长,它们的细胞质中就会含有非常高浓度的核糖体。”

However, his team made their discovery in single-celled yeast and cultured human cells.

然而,他的团队在单细胞酵母和培养的人类细胞中取得了发现。

G.W.

毛重

Gant Luxton , a biophysicist, wanted to see if cells followed the same rules in the more complex environment of a living multicellular organism.

生物物理学家甘特·拉克斯顿 (Gant Luxton) 想看看细胞在活的多细胞生物体的更复杂的环境中是否遵循相同的规则。

In summer 2018, Luxton and Holt met for coffee while both were visiting the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

2018 年夏天,拉克斯顿和霍尔特在参观马萨诸塞州伍兹霍尔的海洋生物实验室时相约喝咖啡。

It took only a few minutes for Luxton to see how to use Holt’s GEMs in his work — but he would need more help.

Luxton 只花了几分钟就了解了如何在工作中使用 Holt 的 GEM,但他需要更多帮助。

He contacted a colleague, the geneticist Daniel Starr , to see if he would be interested in engineering the particles into Caenorhabditis elegans , a microscopic worm.

他联系了一位同事、遗传学家丹尼尔·斯塔尔(Daniel Starr),询问他是否有兴趣将这些粒子植入秀丽隐杆线虫(一种微小的蠕虫)中。

Crucially, this workhorse model organism is transparent, allowing biologists to observe experimental fluorescence such as that given off by GEMs.

至关重要的是,这种主力模型生物体是透明的,使生物学家能够观察实验荧光,例如 GEM 发出的荧光。

While cultured cells had the consistency of honey, the thicker worm cytoplasm resembled “strawberry jam.”

虽然培养的细胞具有蜂蜜的稠度,但较厚的蠕虫细胞质类似于“草莓酱”。

Starr said yes.

斯塔尔说是的。

After receiving funding for the project, Luxton moved his lab to the University of California, Davis, to form the Starr-Luxton lab.

在获得该项目的资助后,拉克斯顿将他的实验室搬到了加州大学戴维斯分校,成立了斯塔尔-拉克斯顿实验室。

It took months for Luxton and Starr to make the worms produce GEMs, and years to figure out how to image and analyze the data.

拉克斯顿和斯塔尔花了几个月的时间让蠕虫产生 GEM,并花了几年的时间才弄清楚如何对数据进行成像和分析。

But eventually they could see and measure the particles glowing in the worms’ gut and skin cells.

但最终他们可以看到并测量蠕虫肠道和皮肤细胞中发光的粒子。

Once inside the cells, the particles hardly moved.

一旦进入细胞,颗粒就几乎不移动。

The worm cytoplasm, measurements showed, was around 50 times more crowded with ribosomes than that of Holt’s cultured cells.

测量显示,蠕虫细胞质中的核糖体数量是霍尔特培养细胞的约 50 倍。

At first, the graduate student conducting the experiments thought they had made a mistake.

起初,进行实验的研究生认为他们犯了一个错误。

“It just kind of blew my mind,” Luxton said.

“这让我大吃一惊,”拉克斯顿说。

“Why aren’t these probes moving?”

“为什么这些探测器不动?”

Another graduate student remarked that while cultured cells had the consistency of honey, the thicker worm cytoplasm resembled “strawberry jam.”

另一位研究生表示,虽然培养的细胞具有蜂蜜般的稠度,但较厚的蠕虫细胞质类似于“草莓酱”。

It was “a very surprising result,” said Holt, a co-author on the paper , which was published in September 2025 in Science Advances .

该论文的合著者霍尔特表示,这是“一个非常令人惊讶的结果”,该论文于 2025 年 9 月发表在《科学进展》杂志上。

“I’ve never seen anything as dramatic as in the epithelium of the worm.”

“我从未见过像蠕虫上皮细胞那样引人注目的东西。”

For Luxton, the result immediately raised questions.

对于拉克斯顿来说,这个结果立即引起了疑问。

For one thing, if the interior of living cells is thick like jam, how does a given molecule move around enough to encounter another molecule it needs to react with?

一方面,如果活细胞的内部像果酱一样厚,那么给定的分子如何移动足以遇到另一个需要与之反应的分子?

“I don’t know how anything ever finds anything,” he said.

“我不知道如何才能找到任何东西,”他说。

Xiangyi Ding (left), G.W.

丁相宜(左),G.W.

Gant Luxton (center), and Daniel Starr (right) engineered GEMs into transparent worms.

Gant Luxton(中)和 Daniel Starr(右)将 GEM 改造为透明蠕虫。

The cytoplasm of the multicellular animal was 50 times more crowded than that of cells grown in culture.

多细胞动物的细胞质比培养细胞的细胞质拥挤 50 倍。

The researchers also noticed that the GEMs seemed stuck in certain regions of the cell.

研究人员还注意到,GEM 似乎卡在细胞的某些区域。

But when Luxton and Starr’s team disrupted the functioning of a large protein called ANC-1 that acts as scaffolding inside cells, the GEMs started moving.

但是,当 Luxton 和 Starr 的团队破坏了一种名为 ANC-1(在细胞内充当支架)的大型蛋白质的功能时,GEM 开始移动。

This suggested that cells have evolved multiple mechanisms to manage crowding in the cytoplasm.

这表明细胞已经进化出多种机制来管理细胞质的拥挤。

“Think of the cell as a box and ribosomes as packing peanuts,” Luxton said.

“把细胞想象成一个盒子,把核糖体想象成包装花生,”拉克斯顿说。

“You can change crowding through the packing peanuts …

“你可以通过包装花生来改变拥挤状况……

but you can also change how big the box is.

但您也可以更改盒子的大小。

It looks like ANC-1’s controlling that aspect of this.

看起来 ANC-1 正在控制这方面。

“It shows there’s very different ways to control crowding,” he continued.

“这表明控制拥挤的方法有很大不同,”他继续说道。

“Cells in tissues may depend much more on spatial organization — compartmentalization, scaffolding, channeling of substrates between enzymes — than we appreciate from studying cells in culture.”

“组织中的细胞可能更多地依赖于空间组织——区室化、支架、酶之间底物的通道——比我们从培养细胞研究中了解到的要多得多。”

Since the publication of the paper on ANC-1, Luxton and his team have put GEMs in worm neurons and other kinds of cells, including diseased and aging ones, to gather baseline data on the cytoplasmic biophysical properties of different tissues.

自从 ANC-1 论文发表以来,Luxton 和他的团队将 GEM 放入蠕虫神经元和其他类型的细胞(包括患病和衰老的细胞)中,以收集不同组织细胞质生物物理特性的基线数据。

“We’ve been building an atlas of worms,” he said.

“我们一直在构建蠕虫地图集,”他说。

With a collaborator, they’ve also started to put GEMs in zebra fish, another common model organism.

他们还与合作者开始将 GEM 植入另一种常见模式生物斑马鱼中。

They are finding a range of crowdedness levels within cells, complicating Holt’s picture that cells prefer to fill 30% to 40% of their volume with molecules.

他们发现细胞内存在一系列拥挤程度,这使得霍尔特的观点变得复杂,即细胞更喜欢用分子填充 30% 到 40% 的体积。

The research underscores the importance of confirming cell culture results in living organisms, which operate under different conditions.

该研究强调了在不同条件下运行的活体中确认细胞培养结果的重要性。

“Cells have found different ways to deal with a continuum of crowdedness,” Luxton said.

“细胞找到了不同的方法来应对连续的拥挤,”拉克斯顿说。

“It really matters where you’re looking, and not all tissues are created equal.”

“你的观察方向确实很重要,而且并不是所有的组织都是一样的。”

Holt agrees.

霍尔特同意。

“Rather than one universal optimal crowding level, it appears that different cell types and tissues tune their crowding to suit their particular needs,” he said.

他说:“不同的细胞类型和组织似乎会调整其拥挤程度以满足其特定需求,而不是一种普遍的最佳拥挤水平。”

It makes sense that, say, a muscle cell that needs to repeatedly contract and relax would have different mechanical properties than a fat cell whose main job is to store energy.

例如,需要反复收缩和放松的肌肉细胞与主要工作是储存能量的脂肪细胞具有不同的机械特性,这是有道理的。

Another line of research involves putting GEMs in organoids — three-dimensional lab-grown structures that can be made to mimic various tissues and organs.

另一项研究涉及将 GEM 放入类器官中,这是一种实验室生长的三维结构,可以模仿各种组织和器官。

Because organoids are 3D, Luxton believes they better approximate living animals than cells floating in test tubes.

由于类器官是 3D 的,Luxton 认为它们比试管中漂浮的细胞更接近活体动物。

He and colleagues are putting GEMs into pancreatic cancer organoids and looking for biophysical differences that could be used to distinguish cancer cells from healthy ones.

他和同事正在将 GEM 放入胰腺癌类器官中,寻找可用于区分癌细胞和健康细胞的生物物理差异。

Scientists have long known that cancer cells are physically distinct .

科学家们早就知道癌细胞在物理上是不同的。

“Cancer is an example where you have big mechanical changes,” Holt said.

“癌症是一个发生重大机械变化的例子,”霍尔特说。

“The way you find a tumor, you look for a lump — a larger cell mass than should be there.

“就像寻找肿瘤一样,你会寻找肿块——比应有的细胞团更大的细胞团。

It’s like pumping air into a tire.

这就像将空气泵入轮胎一样。

Cells are getting squished; they get more crowded.” This, he suggested, would change their biophysical properties.

细胞被压扁;他们变得更加拥挤。”他认为,这将改变它们的生物物理特性。

It’s a heady time, with innovations in biophysics, microscopy, and genetic engineering coming together to open up a new subfield within the centuries-old science of cells.

这是一个令人兴奋的时代,生物物理学、显微镜学和基因工程的创新结合在一起,在具有数百年历史的细胞科学中开辟了一个新的子领域。

“It’s kind of like Pandora’s box,” Luxton said.

“这有点像潘多拉魔盒,”拉克斯顿说。

“Every time we look at a different tissue, we see something we don’t expect.”

“每次我们观察不同的组织时,我们都会看到一些意想不到的东西。”

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