For the first time, scientists have watched the cell's protein factories being built inside a living human cell

Every cell in your body runs on proteins, and the machines that build them — ribosomes — must themselves be built, in a dense corner of the nucleus called the nucleolus. Until now, that assembly line had only ever been studied after taking cells apart. At EMBL Heidelberg, researchers combined two kinds of microscopy to film the process inside intact human cells for the first time, capturing dozens of intermediate steps at finer-than-a-millionth-of-a-metre resolution. The snapshots, published in Science, complete a picture biologists have been sketching from fragments for decades.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation