Kill Zone

When killer T cells of the immune system lock-on to their targets (such as infected or cancerous cells) the point of contact is a complex orchestration of clustering molecules called the immunological synapse. In this study, such synapses and the T cell's inner compartments of toxins (called lytic granules) that will destroy the target are revealed by cryo-expansion microscopy and reconstructed in 3D. Here, captured in situ in fixed, archived brain cancer tissue is a T cell identified as a killer type by the green label, with its toxins highlighted in orange and magenta around its nucleus (cyan)

Read the published research article here

Written by Lindsey Goff

Lindsey Goff

Editor-in-Chief

Formerly immunologist for Cancer Research UK, Lindsey has since moved into the field of scientific publishing. She looks after all BPoD editorial matters.

• Video from work by Florent Lemaître and colleagues
• Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Cell Reports, April 2026