Contractile proteins articles within Nature Communications

Featured

• Article
  24 November 2023 | Open Access

  Discovery of a novel cardiac-specific myosin modulator using artificial intelligence-based virtual screening

  Modulation of the myosin molecular motor has emerged as a potential therapeutic target for both heart disease and heart failure. Here, the authors use AI-based virtual high throughput screening to identify compounds that acts as a cardiac-specific myosin modulators.

  • Priyanka Parijat
  • , Seetharamaiah Attili
  •  & Thomas Kampourakis

• Article
  15 July 2022 | Open Access

  MRTF specifies a muscle-like contractile module in Porifera

  Myocytes are a key cell type that enable animal movement, but their evolutionary origins remain unclear. Colgren and Nichols describe molecular and functional similarities between a contractile module in tissues of a sponge and muscle tissues in other animals, indicating a common evolutionary origin.

  • J. Colgren
  •  & S. A. Nichols

• Article
  06 September 2021 | Open Access

  The regulatory light chain mediates inactivation of myosin motors during active shortening of cardiac muscle

  Heart muscle cells are inactivated when they shorten during ejection, accelerating relaxation to facilitate refilling before the next beat. The authors propose that sequential folding of myosin motors onto the filament backbone may be responsible for shortening-induced de-activation in the heart.

  • Thomas Kampourakis
  •  & Malcolm Irving

• Article
  19 June 2020 | Open Access

  Deconstructing sarcomeric structure–function relations in titin-BioID knock-in mice

  Titin determines the elasticity of the sarcomere and integrates into both the Z-disc and the M-band. Here, the authors generate a BioID mouse to study the titin interactome at the Z-disc region in neonatal and adult heart and skeletal muscle.

  • Franziska Rudolph
  • , Claudia Fink
  •  & Michael Gotthardt

• Article
  12 January 2018 | Open Access

  Disulfide isomerization reactions in titin immunoglobulin domains enable a mode of protein elasticity

  Titin regulates myocyte stiffness through uncoiling and unfolding but these two processes cannot fully explain its elasticity. Here, the authors use atomic force microscopy to study the properties of titin disulfide bonds, showing that disulfide isomerization represents a third mode of titin elasticity.

  • David Giganti
  • , Kevin Yan
  •  & Jorge Alegre-Cebollada

• Article
  26 May 2015 | Open Access

  Intracellular signalling and intercellular coupling coordinate heterogeneous contractile events to facilitate tissue folding

  Epithelial sheet migration proceeds via a series of actomyosin contractions, called pulses, that are stabilized, or ratcheted. Here, Xie and Martin develop a computational framework to determine how pulses are coordinated, and show that ratcheting of pulses allows collective migration by preventing competition with neighbouring pulses.

  • Shicong Xie
  •  & Adam C. Martin

• Article
  10 May 2011 | Open Access

  Chemical treatment enhances skipping of a mutated exon in the dystrophin gene

  Duchenne muscular dystrophy is caused by a loss of thedystrophin gene, and control of dystrophin mRNA splicing could aid treatment of the disease. Nishida et al. show that a small molecule promotes skipping of exon 31 and increases production of a functional dystrophin protein in a patient.

  • Atsushi Nishida
  • , Naoyuki Kataoka
  •  & Masafumi Matsuo