No one knows your own body quite like you, but just when you think you've seen all there is to see, scientists have apparently discovered a new part of the human body that none of us has seen before. No, they haven't found a secret 207th bone in the adult body, but with this medical breakthrough, it's thought that it could power research into one of the world's most devastating diseases.
The human mind remains an enigma, especially as we get older and the likes of Alzheimer's disease rob us of our final years.
Now, a team of scientists at the University of Virginia has seemingly found a brand-new part of the mind that has the potential to help us understand more about Alzheimer's.
Assistant professor Seham Ebrahim and her team discovered a new part of a human cell, with the organelle being dubbed 'hemifusome'. Observing filaments that help maintain the shape of cells, Ebrahim spotted the hemifusome. Similar to full-size organs inside our bodies, organelles within cells are specific structures that each have their own health functions.
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This new structure kept appearing on 3D images, with the team eventually naming the hemifusome and hypothesizing that it's involved in sorting, recycling, and discarding proteins within human cells.
Ebrahim describes the shape as similar to a snowman wearing a scarf, so imagine a small head attached to a bigger body, separated by a thin border.
The hemifusome is only about 100 nanometers in diameter, making it less than half the size of an already tiny mitochondrion. They were able to locate hemifusomes using a cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) technique that rapidly freezes cells to preserve their structure.
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Speaking to Live Science, Ebrahim explained: "It's like a snapshot in time without any kind of chemical or any kind of stain."
With this imaging technique, they peeked inside cells in a 'very native state', like looking into glass balls.
In a May 2025 paper that was published in Nature Communications, the team confirmed that while they've been able to prove the existence of the hemifusome, they're yet to pinpoint what it does, its life cycle, or its composition.
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Still, Ebrahim suggests that hemifusomes are precursors to certain vesicles and could play a crucial role in the recycling or disposal of cellular membranes. As this helps prevent the buildup of waste in cells that could interfere with operations, hemifusomes have been potentially linked to how Alzheimer's manifests. Considering Alzheimer's disease can be attributed to the improper clearing of abnormal protein plaques in the brain, Ebrahim hopes to continue her research.
As for the breakthrough discovery, she concluded: "Without cryo-electron tomography, we would have missed this discovery."
Looking at this relatively new way of exploring the human body, she excitedly cheered: "There's probably a whole world out there that we still have to find."