By Anushka Bansal/ The Chicago Maroon
Potato chips, electrolytes after a workout, the taste of our tears: How do the compartments of our cells work when there’s salt around?
Recent research by the Krishnan Group, published in Nature Biotechnology, has unveiled the previously unknown intricacies of sodium and potassium ion movements within cellular compartments, or organelles, elevating our understanding of how cells grapple with salt stress. The Krishnan Group is an organic chemistry lab led by Yamuna Krishnan, professor of chemistry at UChicago.
In an interview with The Maroon, Krishnan said, “All of biology, and I would argue, all of life—plants, us, everything—revolves around maintaining the sodium and potassium levels across the cell membrane; otherwise, cells won’t survive.”
Junyi Zou, the post-doc in Krishnan’s lab responsible for the investigation of sodium ions within cell organelles, said, “My work really makes an advance that now we can look at an organelle-specific sodium protein, the function of it, and combine it with our existing knowledge about this protein.”