In an important early step toward understanding the chemistry of human thought, Stanford chemists have managed for the first time to read the individual chemical messages that cells exchange. These messages account for nearly all of the communication that takes place in the brain, but previous efforts to record them one at a time have been thwarted by their extremely small size. Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Chemistry, and his colleagues published the technique that allowed them to read out the contents of individual vesicles in the journal Science earlier this year.
Cells use vesicles to signal each other in a variety of ways.
Other messages regulate the female reproductive cycle. By analyzing large numbers of vesicles together, scientists had learned a great deal about the vocabulary of the cell's language. But this method can deduce only average messages. Zare suspected the average message might not be a good representation of any single vesicle's contents. I thought likely so, and indeed our work shows that to be the case.