Scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MKS) are part of an international consortium working to determine the biological functions of the roughly 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome.

Conventional methods generally analyze many proteins simultaneously. The specific traits of individual protein molecules are thus often unclear. A research team led by Dr. Sarina Veit and Professor Thomas Günther-Pomorski at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, in collaboration with researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and the University of Toronto, Canada, has developed a new microscopy platform that overcomes this limitation. The method allows the simultaneous examination of hundreds of tiny membrane spheres each with a diameter of only about 200 nanometers. Each of these synthetic membrane spheres contains just one lipid transport protein. Using this method, the researchers can conduct measurements at the level of individual protein molecules. At the same time, the platform is flexible enough to be used to examine other proteins as well. The researchers report their results in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology from June 15, 2026.