Paraspeckle

In anatomy, a paraspeckle is an irregularly shaped compartment of the cell, approximately 0.2-1 μm in size, found in the nucleus' interchromatin space. First documented in HeLa cells, where there are generally 10-30 per nucleus, paraspeckles are now known to also exist in all human primary cells, transformed cell lines and tissue sections. Their name is derived from their distribution in the nucleus; the "para" is short for parallel and the "speckle" refers to the splicing speckles to which they are always in close proximity. Their function is not known, but they may localize proteins in the nucleus.