Imagine trying to find your friend in a stadium packed with people, except the stadium contained not 60,000 people, but 60 trillion.
A single human cell is almost unimaginably complex, containing trillions of macromolecules (DNA, RNA, protein, lipids, etc). A simple yet important question is how these components are organized so that they can cooperate to control discrete processes. The broad answer to this question is that molecules that are involved in a particular process are organized into organelles, membrane-bound compartments which can be considered the organs of a cell.
But how are molecules organized within these organelles? And how are molecules outside of organelles – floating freely in the cytoplasm, or attached to membranes or the cytoskeleton – able to find each other within this overwhelmingly complex milieu to interact?
A new answer to this problem has emerged with the discovery of biomolecular condensates – membrane-less droplets within the cytoplasm or within organelles. These droplets are condensed conglomerations of molecules that cooperate to achieve some biomolecular process. They are incredibly common and – not surprisingly – when they do not form correctly, disease can result. But discovering how disease develops at the molecular level is an opportunity to find a solution, and now several new pharmaceutical companies are trying to exploit this new discovery to treat diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative disease.

Biomolecular Blobs