Isolation of Cell Nuclei Using Inert Macromolecules to Mimic the Crowded Cytoplasm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cell nuclei are commonly isolated and studied in media which include millimolar concentrations of cations, which conserve the nuclear volume by screening the negative charges on chromatin and maintaining its compaction. However, two factors question if these ionic conditions correctly reproduce the environment of nuclei in vivo: the small-scale motion and conformation of chromatin in vivo are not reproduced in isolated nuclei, and experiments and theory suggest that small ions in the cytoplasm are not free in the soluble phase but are predominantly bound to macromolecules. We studied the possible role in maintaining the structure and functions of nuclei in vivo of a further but frequently overlooked property of the cytoplasm, the crowding or osmotic effects caused by diffusible macromolecules whose concentration, measured in several studies, is in the range of 130 mg/ml. Nuclei which conserved their volume in the cell and their ultrastructure seen by electron microscopy were released from K562 cells in media containing the inert polymer 70 kDa Ficoll (50% w/v) or 70 kDa dextran (35% w/v) to replace the diffusible cytoplasmic molecules which were dispersed on cell lysis with digitonin, with 100 microM K-Hepes buffer as the only source of ions. Immunofluorescence labelling and experiments using cells expressing GFP-fusion proteins showed that internal compartments (nucleoli, PML and coiled bodies, foci of RNA polymerase II) were conserved in these nuclei, and nascent RNA transcripts could be elongated. Our observations are consistent with the hypothesis that crowding by diffusible cytoplasmic macromolecules is a crucial but overlooked factor which supports the nucleus in vivo by equilibrating the opposing osmotic pressure cause by the high concentration of macromolecules in the nucleus, and suggest that crowded media provide more physiological conditions to study nuclear structure and functions. They may also help to resolve the long-standing paradox that the small-scale motion and irregular conformation of chromatin seen in vivo are not reproduced in nuclei isolated in conventional ionic media.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".