Tunnelling nanotubes: Life's secret network



Tunnelling nanotubes seem to play a major role in anything
from how our immune system responds to attacks, to how
damaged muscle is repaired after a heart attack (Image: Paul McMenamin / UWA)

HAD Amin Rustom not messed up, he would not have stumbled upon one of the biggest
discoveries in biology of recent times. It all began in 2000, when he saw something strange
under his microscope. A very long, thin tube had formed between two of the rat cells that
he was studying. It looked like nothing he had ever seen before.

His supervisor, Hans-Hermann Gerdes, asked him to repeat the experiment. Rustom did,
and saw nothing unusual. When Gerdes grilled him, Rustom admitted that the first time
around he had not followed the standard protocol of swapping the liquid in which the cells
were growing between observations. Gerdes made him redo the experiment, mistakes and all,
and there they were again: long, delicate connections between cells. This was something
new - a previously unknown way in which animal cells can communicate with each other.

Gerdes and Rustom, then at Heidelberg University in Germany, called the connections
tunnelling nanotubes. Aware that they might be onto something significant, the duo slogged
away to produce convincing evidence and eventually published a landmark paper in 2004
(Science, vol 303, p 1007).