Scientists observe protein folding in living cells for the first time

Even in sleep, the human body is rarely still—and within it, there is the constant motion of the contents of our cells and the proteins within.

Until now, scientists have had to estimate the speed of complex but common actions such as protein folding (which turns an unorganized polypeptide strand into a complex and useful three-dimensional protein). They could watch the action unfold, so to speak, in a test tube but weren’t sure how close the pace conformed to real life.

A group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, however, have developed a system to move the observation out of in vitro and into in vivo.

"This is the first experiment that allows us to observe the dynamics of a protein folding in a live cell," Martin Gruebele, a chemist at Illinois and co-author of the study, said in a prepared statement. "Now we have the capability of looking at how fast biological processes occur as a function of time."