📖 Laminin, the Cross Shaped Protein

Forget the shape for a minute. The function is the genuinely astonishing part.

Every sheet of cells in your body sits on something. Your skin, the lining of your gut, the filters in your kidneys, the membranes around your muscle fibres. Underneath each one is a thin layer called a basement membrane, and that layer is what the cells hold on to.

Laminins are a main building block of it.

📌 They are not optional. Without laminins, basement membranes do not form, and embryo development stops at an early stage.

That is not preaching. That is the opening paragraph of the standard structural review of laminins, written by Erhard Hohenester at Imperial College London.

Each laminin is made of three different protein chains, called alpha, beta and gamma, locked together by chemical bonds. One end of the molecule grips the cell surface. The other ends link to other laminins, forming a network, so what you end up with is a mesh that cells can stand on and hang from at the same time.

It does not work alone. Other proteins such as nidogen bind into the same network, and a basement membrane is a team effort rather than one molecule's achievement.

And when laminins fail, people suffer. Faults in laminin genes cause severe human disease, including forms of muscular dystrophy and blistering skin disorders, and a kidney and eye condition called Pierson syndrome.

💡 So the claim that laminin helps hold you together is not hype. It is a fair plain English summary of what the literature says.

Around 1979, two laboratories independently purified a large, unfamiliar protein from the matrix produced by mouse tumour cells.

When antibodies against it were tested on mouse tissue, they lit up the basement membranes, which are also called basal laminae. That is where Rupert Timpl and his colleagues got the name. Laminin.

In the early 1980s researchers imaged it using a technique called rotary shadowing electron microscopy. What came out was a molecule with four arms: one long arm around 77 nanometres ending in a prominent blob, and three shorter arms around 34 nanometres each ending in a pair of smaller blobs.

Long arm down. Three shorter arms out and up.

📌 That is a cross. The researchers said so, the word cruciform went into the literature, and it has been there ever since.

So this part of the story is not invented. A real scientific paper described a real molecule as cross shaped, decades before any pastor mentioned it.

Then comes the sentence that almost nobody who shares the image has read.

Writing in 2019 about those original micrographs, Hohenester notes that although a range of shapes was seen in the images, only a cross with roughly perpendicular arms entered the literature. He calls that somewhat unfortunate, because inside an actual basement membrane the structure of laminin is more likely to resemble a three spoked umbrella than a cross.

⚠️ An umbrella. Standing up on the cell surface, three spokes out at the top, the long arm reaching down to grip the cell.

Both descriptions are of the same molecule. The cross is what it looks like flattened onto a slide for imaging. The umbrella is closer to how it is thought to sit in living tissue.

The clean, symmetrical cross that gets shared is a schematic. Scientists draw those to show which part of the molecule is which, in the same way a map of the underground is not a photograph of tunnels. The actual electron micrographs are grainy, and the arms bend.

There is not one laminin. Mammals have at least fifteen different ones, assembled from five alpha chains, four beta chains and three gamma chains. Only fifteen of the sixty possible combinations have actually been confirmed in the laboratory.

And they are not all built the same. Several chains are missing the domains that form the short arms entirely, which means the laminins made from them cannot have the full four armed shape. The familiar cross belongs to laminin-111, the one that happened to be purified first.

📌 The sermon says laminin is shaped like a cross. The literature says one well studied laminin is, and the family is more varied than that.

A protein is not a little metal ornament. It flexes, folds and changes shape to do its job. Studies of laminin's arms have found a pronounced kink in one of them, and curvature in another. A fixed symmetrical cross is a simplification of something that moves.

This is the big one, and it needs its own section. Keep reading.

The version almost everyone has met comes from the pastor Louie Giglio, who paired an image of laminin with a line from Colossians 1 in a widely shared message about the scale and detail of creation. The idea landed hard: the glue holding your cells together is shaped like the cross, and the One who made it is the One who holds all things.

It is a beautiful thought, and the instinct behind it is right.

✅ Creation really does testify. That is a biblical claim, not a sentimental one.

And the body in particular is held up in Scripture as something to be amazed by, long before anyone owned a microscope.

So the impulse to look at a cell and worship is not the problem. The problem is what happens when the argument is built on the shape rather than on the Maker.

Worth knowing: the sharpest corrections to the laminin argument have come from Christians, not from atheists. Answers in Genesis, a creationist organisation, has published a piece taking it apart. So has the physicist and science educator Jay Wile. This is not believers against sceptics. It is Christians asking other Christians to make better arguments.

Read the verse with the one before it, the way Paul wrote it.

Look at the scale Paul is working at. Heaven and earth. Visible and invisible. Thrones, dominions, principalities, powers. He is talking about governments and angelic authorities and galaxies and atoms, all of it, held in place by Christ.

📌 All things consist in the King James. Modern translations often render it hold together, which is where the laminin illustration gets its hook.

Both are good translations of a Greek word meaning to hold together, to cohere, to be sustained. And Paul's point is a claim about the entire created order, continuing every second, not a prophecy about a molecule discovered in 1979.

Which means something important. If laminin were shaped like a hexagon, Colossians 1:17 would be exactly as true.

⚠️ And that is the real reason to be careful with this one.

When you tie a verse to a scientific detail, you hand your argument's strength to that detail. A reader who finds out that not all laminins are crosses, or that the image was a drawing, does not just drop the illustration. They start wondering what else they were told too confidently.

A truth as big as Colossians 1 does not need the help, and the same instinct is worth applying to other viral claims. We have written about that pattern in the search for Noah's ark and in what the science actually says about the Shroud of Turin.

The structural picture of a single laminin molecule is, in Hohenester's words, essentially complete. Crystal structures now cover every part of it.

What is not finished is the network. Nobody has yet imaged native laminin polymers inside a real basement membrane at molecular resolution, which is why the arrangement in living tissue is still a model rather than a picture.

💡 So the honest situation is almost the opposite of the viral version.

The shape of one laminin is known in enormous detail. How thousands of them actually hold you together is the part still being worked out. That is a more interesting fact than the cross, and it is true.

Three things to take away.

📌 The protein is real and the function is staggering. No laminin, no basement membrane, no body. That deserves worship on its own terms.

📌 The cross shape is real for one laminin, in one kind of image. It is not the whole family, it is not a photograph, and it is not how the molecule stands in your tissue.

📌 Colossians 1:17 is bigger than this. Paul was not pointing at a cell. He was pointing at everything.

There is a kind of faith that needs the diagram to be true. And there is a kind that can lose the diagram and not lose anything at all.

If you want to think more carefully about where faith and science actually meet, read can a Christian trust science. And if you want to be the person in the group chat who checks before sharing, how to defend your faith in Jesus is the better foundation than any molecule.

He holds all things together. He always did, whatever shape they turned out to be.