Crowded rooms: How Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh researchers solved a cell mystery. A surreal video of stressed cells under a microscope inspired a group of kidney physiologists and biologists from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University to investig
Their research, which was recently published in the journal, shows how the researchers connected the dots on a conundrum that was initially presented three decades ago with a little bit of luck.
“I looked at her, and she asked me what was going on, like I was supposed to know,” he said. “And I said, ‘I have no idea, but I think it’s probably something important!’” Then, in the early 2000s, With-No-Lysine Kinases, or “WNKs,” were identified as a new type of enzyme. For years, scientists theorized that WNK kinases reversed cell shrinkage, but how they did so was unexplained.
Those liquid-like droplets were the “lava lamp” that Shiwarski and Boyd-Shiwarski were seeing that fateful day when they experimented with adding a salt solution to the cells. They had fluorescently tagged the WNKs, which were diffused throughout the cytosol, causing the whole cell to glow. When salt was added, the WNKs came together, forming large neon-green globules that oozed about the cell like the goo in a lava lamp.
“There’s a lot of people out there who don’t believe phase separation is physiologically relevant,” explained Boyd-Shiwarski, assistant professor in the Renal-Electrolyte Division at Pitt’s School of Medicine. “They think it’s something that happens in a test tube when you overexpress proteins or occurs as a pathological process but doesn’t really happen in normal healthy cells.”
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