A new study in the field of biophysics has revealed how large molecules are able to enter the nucleus of a cell. A team led by Professor Edward Lemke of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has thus provided important insights into how some viruses, for example, can penetrate into the nucleus of a cell, where they can continue to proliferate and infect others. They have also demonstrated that the efficiency of transport into a cell decreases as the size of the molecules increases and how corresponding signals on the surface can compensate for this. "We have been able to gain new understanding of the transport of large biostructures, which helped us develop a simple model that describes how this works," said Lemke, a specialist in the field of biophysical chemistry. He is Professor of Synthetic Biophysics at JGU and Adjunct Director of the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) in Mainz.
