Scientists spy a crown-shaped sulfur ring in mammalian cells

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Biologists who focus on human cells can tend to think of bacterial metabolism as a bizarre riot, irrelevant to their own fields. But researchers led by Takaaki Akaike at Tohoku University report that an eight-membered sulfur ring, once thought to be a bacterial curiosity, is produced in mammalian cells too ( Science 2026, DOI: 10.1126/science.aec5473).

Sulfur is less abundant in biology than elemental heavy hitters like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen—but where it appears, like in the amino acid cysteine and the metabolite glutathione, it tends to have an outsized role in biochemistry because of its reactivity. The elemental sulfur allotrope, cyclo-octasulfur or S 8 , is rarer still but has been detected in bacteria and fungi.