Juan Iglesias Artola is a Falling Walls finalist

A cell makes more than a thousand chemically distinct lipids and every membrane holds its own precise mixture. Proteins can be followed by tagging their genes. Lipids cannot, so how a cell gets each one to the right place was unknown.

The work was done in the Nadler lab at MPI-CBG in Dresden and produced the first quantitative map of lipid flux inside cells. Sorting runs mainly on transport that uses no vesicles, and it tells apart lipids differing by a single double bond, moving some up to seven times faster than others.

Around 130 human proteins carry lipids between compartments and only a handful have been pursued as drug targets, largely because the protein behind a given fault is unknown. Fatty liver disease alone affects close to a third of adults worldwide.

• The finalist's profile at Falling Walls
• The interview about the breakthrough
• Quantitative imaging of lipid transport in mammalian cells, in Nature