Inlay

Profile

Oliver Rocks

Check out our new release on BioRxiv co-lead by @pm-mueller.bsky.social 👉 rb.gy/lnrizk special🙏 to Severine Kunz #MDC @leventallab.bsky.social @andimicroscopy.bsky.social @ewerslab.bsky.social and Kedar Narayan @NCI CCR VolumeEM Are the days of discovering new cellular structures over?? /1

Philippe Bastiaens Memorial Symposium @MPI Dortmund

Celebrating Philippe’s enormous scientific legacy. A sad occasion, but also a deeply touching homecoming and reunion.

1mo

How do rods form? Solid domains exclude reticulon proteins, which require packing defects for membrane insertion. Their displacement inhibits ER tubulation, driving membrane flattening and multilayered wrapping into rods. 🦉The ER exploits membrane solidification to spatially organize proteins! /6

Video

Implications? 🤔new conceptual framework for understanding ER compartmentalisation, the regulation of the sheet-tubule equilibrium, and organelle plasticity? 🤔homeoviscous mechanism - rods acting as a sink for solidifying lipids to buffer the ER against acute thermal or metabolic fluctuations? /7

Mammalian membranes are thought to universally avoid macroscopic solidification, as reduced fluidity impairs plasticity and protein function. Cells counter this via lipid unsaturation and cholesterol buffering. However, the ER is deliberately cholesterol-poor to maintain high-curvature membranes!/5

1mo

Rods form as a function of temperature and lipid composition: in standard cell culture typically <30°C but also in vivo at 37°C - in alveolar type II lung cells natively enriched in saturated lipids /4 🙏Melissa Mikolaj @ Kedar Narayan lab

Rods have a continuous multilamellar architecture - unlike any known cellular membrane organisation - and occur across all cell types tested /3 🙏 @andimicroscopy.bsky.social

We show that - in mammalian cells and in vivo - saturated lipids in the #endoplasmic reticulum can demix into stable, micrometer-scale #solid-like domains. The resulting long-range orientational order in the membrane gives rise to cell-spanning, rigid tubular structures, we term #rods /2

1mo

Oliver Rocks

1mo

Oliver Rocks

Original image from 2011 of what I just had seen under the microscope when I ran into @oliverrocks.bsky.social’s office to show him. Turned out he’d observed this too, had no idea what it was either, but was just as stunned and curious as I was. This is how it all started... /1

1mo

Video

Paul Markus Müller 🏳️‍🌈

Video

1mo

Video

Oliver Rocks