The NPC, in detail

The nuclear pore complex (NPC) is a huge cylindrical assembly that transports material to and from the nucleus. In a biological tour de force, researchers have determined the positions of all 456 proteins of the NPC, providing structural insights of unprecedented detail. Among other discoveries, Svetlana Dokudovskaya, Liesbeth Veenhoff, Michael Rout, Brian Chait (Rockefeller University, New York, NY), Frank Alber, Andrej Sali (University of California, San Francisco, CA), and colleagues show that the large, complicated NPC is formed by only a few, structurally similar modules, including 16 repeated columns.

The researchers combined data on the size, shape, structure, and neighbors of every NPC protein to create a set of positional probabilities, or “restraints,” which were then analyzed and optimized to produce a final structure. Rout compared it in...