Overview

• A collaborative team at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health published the discovery in Nature Communications.
• Hemifusomes transiently assemble and disassemble to serve as hubs where vesicles fuse and exchange molecular cargo.
• These structures were previously undetected because conventional imaging lacked the necessary resolution.
• Evidence suggests hemifusome dysfunction may contribute to genetic disorders such as Hermansky-Pudlak syndrome.
• Next, scientists plan to compare hemifusome activity in healthy and diseased cells to guide the development of targeted therapies.