Molecular biophysics articles from across Nature Portfolio

Yang et al. report that the nucleolar protein fibrillarin (FBL) affects acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) cell function through biomolecular condensation-dependent regulation of early pre-rRNA processing and translation.

In eukaryotes, G-quadruplex in mRNA (RG4) 5′ UTR inhibit translation initiation. Here the authors employ single molecule assay to show that RG4 in E. coli reporter increases translation efficiency by preventing ribosome dislodging.

Here the authors structurally and mechanistically characterize the assembly of FADD, procaspase-8, and cFLIP through their death-effector domains (DEDs), providing insights into the regulation of apoptotic and necroptotic signalling.

Here, the authors use small angle neutron scattering and coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations to demonstrate that condensates based on the granular components of nucleoli are network fluids.

Loop regions play a key role in protein evolution. Herein the authors demonstrate how GH19 chitinase acquired additional antifungal activity by introducing remote loops, without compromising its original function. This work offers an innovative approach to expand enzyme function.

Organ morphogenesis begins with proliferation, which results in tissue pressures and site-specific YAP expression, nuclear translocation and signalling. A study now reports the involvement of anisotropy, localized pressure and YAP signalling in organizer-forming cascades, introducing a new chapter of molecular mechanobiology of organogenesis.

Intrinsically disordered regions of proteins are prevalent across the kingdoms of life; however, biophysical characterization is expensive, requiring specialized expertise and equipment and time-consuming sample preparation. By combining simulations and deep learning, we have developed a method to predict their average ensemble properties directly from sequence.

Ribonucleoprotein granules are ubiquitous in living organisms with the protein and RNA components having distinct roles. In the absence of proteins, RNAs are shown to undergo phase separation upon heating. This transition is driven by desolvation entropy and ion-mediated crosslinking and is tuned by the chemical specificity of the RNA nucleobases.

An infrared laser-induced temperature jump provides a rapid and broadly applicable perturbation to protein dynamics. Temperature-jump crystallography was paired with time-resolved X-ray crystallography to study the dynamic enzyme lysozyme. Measurements with and without a functional inhibitor revealed different patterns in the propagation of motion throughout the enzyme.

We engineered a tagged version of the yeast Rad51 recombinase and used this tool to monitor DNA double-strand break repair in living cells. We could observe how a broken DNA fragment can scout the nucleus to identify a similar sequence and use it as a template for repair.

I share my opinions on the benefits of and bottlenecks for hyperspectral and time-resolved imaging. I also discuss current and future perspectives for analyzing these types of data using the phasor approach.