A cellular strategy for building protein-making machines

To keep cells running, ribosomes—the molecular machines that make proteins—must be built continuously and with high precision. Now, researchers from the lab of David Haselbach at the IMP, together with collaborators, capture ribosomes at their earliest stages of assembly and discover a flexible, modular strategy behind their construction. Published in Nucleic Acids Research, the study shows that ribosome assembly proceeds in parallel rather than along a strict assembly line, offering new insight into how cells reliably build their protein-making machines.

Early ribosome assembly in action, visualised by cryo-electron microscopy. Multiple intermediate stages of ribosome formation are shown.

Researchers from the lab of David Haselbach at the IMP, together with collaborators, have now revealed how the ribosome comes together at its very earliest stages, discovering a flexible assembly logic that challenges this traditional view. By combining high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy with quantitative mass spectrometry, the team captured snapshots of ribosomes while they are still under construction—showing that different parts of the ribosomal RNA can form independently and in parallel, rather than in a strict, step-by-step order.

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Original publication 

Magdalena Gerhalter, Michael Prattes, Lorenz Emanuel Grundmann, Irina Grishkovskaya, Enrico F. Semeraro, Gertrude Zisser, Harald Kotisch, Juliane Merl-Pham, Stefanie M. Hauck, David Haselbach and Helmut Bergler (2026): “A comprehensive view on r-protein binding and rRNA domain structuring during early eukaryotic ribosome formation.” Nucleic Acids Research (2026). DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkag036

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