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Building a Factory
30 March 2012

Building a Factory

It’s difficult to imagine a factory that makes factories. Conveyor belts full of new conveyor belts; machines building machines; each pieced together with a precise blueprint and then exported for use elsewhere. In the cell nucleus, protein factories called ribosomes are assembled in a ‘factory of factories’ called the nucleolus (shown here stained in blue) and then exported to the cytoplasm to begin work. Manufacturing the cell’s estimated 15000 Ribosomes requires a special combination of tools that exist together in nucleoli. Enzymes called fibrillarin (stained here in red) and HP1β (shown here attached to a green fluorescent protein) help to build ribosomes by regulating how quickly their DNA blueprint can be read, an example of epigenetics.

Written by John Ankers

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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