ArticleThe Journal of cell biology2026
Systematic membrane thickness variation across cellular organelles revealed by cryo-ET.
Article in The Journal of cell biology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- MemBrain v2: an end-to-end tool for the analysis of membranes in cryo-electron tomography.Nature methods · 2026Article
- Structural Remodeling of Mitochondrial Membranes in Cancerous Colon Cells: Insights from Neutron Scattering and Lipidomics.ACS bio & med chem Au · 2026Article
- The vault associates with membranes in situ.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Surface Morphometrics reveals local membrane thickness variation in organellar subcompartments.The Journal of cell biology · 2026Article
- Surface morphometrics reveals local membrane thickness variation in organellar subcompartments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In eukaryotes, membrane-bound organelles create distinct molecular environments. The compartmentalizing lipid bilayer is a dynamic composite material whose thickness and curvature modulate the structure and function of membrane proteins. In vitro, bilayer thickness correlates with lipid composition. Cellular membranes in situ, however, are continuously remodeled, and the spatial variation of their biophysical properties remains understudied. Here, we present a computational approach to measure local membrane thickness in cryo-electron tomograms. Our analysis of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and human cells reveals systematic thickness variations within and across organelles. Notably, we observe thickness gradients across the Golgi apparatus that orthogonally support long-standing models of differential sorting of transmembrane proteins based on hydrophobic matching. Our publicly available workflow readily integrates within existing tomogram analysis pipelines and, when applied across experimental systems, provides a quantitative foundation for exploring relationships between membrane thickness and function in native cellular environments.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.