Architecture of the nuclear pore complex coat

Abstract

A closeup view of the nuclear pore's coat The precise molecular architecture of the nuclear pore complex (NPC), which mediates traffic between the cytoplasm and the nucleus, has been difficult to ascertain owing to the size and complexity of this subcellular structure. Now, Stuwe et al. describe the crystal structure of the intact ç400-kD coat nucleoporin complex (CNC) of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the presence of an engineered antibody fragment. Docking the crystal structure into an electron tomography reconstruction of the human NPC established the presence of 32 copies of the CNC arranged in four stacked rings and revealed the details of higher-order CNC oligomerization at the near-atomic level. Science , this issue p. 1148