Amazing stuff!
"... vaults, those strange barrel-shaped particles in our cells that have no known function. ... discovered the objects in rodent cells in the 1980s ...
Yesterday [11/4/2026], Anthropic released those findings, showing that simple bacteria and even viruses appear able to make vaults from previously unidentified versions of the Major Vault Protein (MVP). ..."
From the abstract:
"Vaults are the largest ribonucleoprotein particles in eukaryotic cells, built from 78 copies of the major vault protein (MVP), yet their function remains unknown four decades after their discovery.
MVP homologs occur in prokaryotes and bacteriophages, but whether they form vaults is unknown.
Here, we show that prokaryotic and bacteriophage MVP homologs assemble into vault particles.
We surveyed approximately 15 billion proteins, found MVP homologs in 29 bacterial and 4 archaeal phyla, and used size-exclusion chromatography to rapidly screen and isolate vault particles of eight homologs expressed in Escherichia coli. Cryo-electron microscopy structures of the phage homolog L05 at high resolution reveal a shell of 96 MVP chains enclosing a volume ~25% larger than human vaults, among the largest protein shells of defined size outside virus capsids. Prokaryotic MVPs typically carry seven wall repeats and eukaryotic MVPs nine, and adding wall repeats to L05 yields larger vaults.
Prokaryotic vaults expand the known diversity of vault architecture and offer a tractable system for studying vault assembly and a size-tunable scaffold for cargo encapsulation."
Exclusive: AI company’s research deepens mystery of vaults, cells’ strangest particles
Prokaryotic homologs of the major vault protein form engineerable vault nanocapsules (preprint, open access)
Vaultlike structures made from the viral protein L05 (left) incorporate 96 copies of the molecule, whereas human vaults (right) assemble from 78 copies of our version of the protein
Fig. 3 Cryo-EM of L05 vaults made in E. coli: a field of particles (large panel), selected single vaults (bottom), and 2D class averages in which the ribs of the wall are visible (right).
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