Subcellular Compartmentalization of Metabolism

Our cells are incredibly diverse. Visualising the metabolism of individual cells is critical to understanding how our organs and body work. However, metabolic reactions happen in milliseconds in areas 50 times thinner than a human hair. Bilal Sheikh, Niculina Musat, and Hryhoriy Stryhanyuk are developing a new technology dubbed Meta-SCOPE to visualize metabolism in single cells, shedding light on important but to-date invisible cellular processes.

This project is part of the 2022 Nutrient Sensing cohort

Researchers in this cohort are developing new technologies to measure or visualize nutrient levels within cells. Their work addresses a key need in the field, namely the ability to capture detailed information about metabolites, chemical compounds, and other nutrients in live individual cells. These new techniques could propel understanding of the basic biology of cells as well as how metabolism or nutrition processing goes wrong in diseases like diabetes or malnutrition.