Nuclear export, enlightened

摘要

The physicist Richard Feynman once quipped that the key to solving or making significant progress on a scientific problem was to "find the open channel." For the cell biological problem of nucleus-to-cytoplasm transport, the literal open channels have long been known: the nuclear pore complexes (NPCs). However, in the metaphorical sense as well, recent work has significantly "opened" the NPC channel as regards the biophysics of the engagement and transit of outward-bound cargo. In this issue of PNAS, Sie-brasse et al. (1) track single molecules of a native messenger RNA and provide details on the approach of these transcripts to the NPCs, the probability and persistence of engagement, and the channel transit times. This impressive