Scientists have long puzzled over cholesterol. It’s biologically necessary; it’s observably harmful — and nobody knows what it’s doing where it’s most abundant in cells: in the cell membrane.
Now, for the first time, chemists at the University of Illinois at Chicago have used a path-breaking optical imaging technique to pinpoint cholesterol’s location and movement within the membrane. They made the surprising finding that, in addition to its many other biological roles, cholesterol is a signaling molecule that transmits messages across the cell membrane.
