Rickettsia are bacterial pathogens that cause spotted fevers and typhus. They are so small that they can go inside the cells of the people they infect. In this image, Rickettsia are the magenta rods and internal membranes of the human cell are shown in cyan.

This image (and the video it is was part of) overturn a century-long hypothesis that Rickettsia end up in the nucleus by accident and instead suggest that these pathogens may hijack a previously unknown cellular mechanism that enables nucleocytoplasmic transport of large cargo- a pathway that can be further characterized to better understand fundamental nuclear envelope biology and engineer tools to deliver large cargo to human cell nuclei.