This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A cell sitting in fluid looks like one of the most passive things in biology. Nutrients drift toward it on the aimless currents of molecular motion, and now and then one bumps into the right spot on the cell's surface and gets pulled inside.
This impression of the cell as a lottery run by chance, with the molecules wandering and the cell waiting, is a misconception. Biologists have long known the picture is busier than that. Cells are active, and the fluid around them is crowded with working molecules.
What researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), with national and international partners, have now added is a new twist. Their study, published in Small, has shown that the fluid around a cell is not an empty, neutral stage, as one might assume. In fact, it plays a crucial role in transporting molecules into cells.
Research teams from the University of Pennsylvania, IIT Jodhpur and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata worked with IITGN to report that a chemical reaction occurring in the fluid outside a cell can, on its own, cause the cell to take up more of a particular cargo. "The agents of that change are enzymes, the protein machines that drive a vast range of reactions in the body, and, remarkably, they do it without entering the cell or altering the cargo at all," explained Dr. Krishna Kanti Dey, corresponding author of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Physics at IITGN.
Dey leads the Soft and Living Matter Laboratory, which studies how systems that generate their own motion behave at the smallest scales. To understand this study better, picture a pond. If one dropped a tennis ball in the still water, it would barely move.
The ball would drift on whatever faint currents happened to exist. Now imagine the pond is full of small, tireless swimmers, each one kicking and sloshing water around. None of them touches the ball, but their collective churning sets up a restlessness in the water.
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