Genetics articles within Nature Chemistry

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• Research Briefing | 09 April 2024

  Masked acid chlorides for proximity labelling of RNA

  A non-radical proximity labelling platform — BAP-seq — is presented that uses subcellular-localized BS2 esterase to convert unreactive enol-based probes into highly reactive acid chlorides in situ to label nearby RNAs. When paired with click-handle-mediated enrichment and sequencing, this chemistry enables high-resolution spatial mapping of RNAs across subcellular compartments.

• Article | 05 January 2023

  Non-complementary strand commutation as a fundamental alternative for information processing by DNA and gene regulation

  The complementarity of the two strands in the DNA double helix provides a mechanism for the storage and processing of genetic information. Now, an alternative ‘strand commutation’ mechanism of data processing with DNA/RNA has been revealed based on the reversible low-affinity interactions of essentially non-complementary nucleic acids.

  • Maxim P. Nikitin

• Article | 03 August 2020

  CD44 regulates epigenetic plasticity by mediating iron endocytosis

  CD44 is a cell-surface adhesion receptor associated with many biological processes that rely on cellular plasticity. Now, CD44 has been shown to mediate endocytosis of iron-bound hyaluronates. Furthermore, iron catalyses the demethylation of repressive histone marks, thereby unlocking the expression of genes regulating cellular plasticity.

  • Sebastian Müller
  • , Fabien Sindikubwabo
  •  & Raphaël Rodriguez

• News & Views | 29 May 2020

  Exploring epigenetics with chemical tools

  Identifying chromatin modifications and their interactomes is imperative to understand how chromatin functions and is regulated. Now, two new studies report on chemical tools that enable characterization of the biological interactions within native chromatin.

  • Yi Zhang
  •  & Tatiana G. Kutateladze

• Article | 30 April 2018

  A molecular multi-gene classifier for disease diagnostics

  Gene expression profiling remains cost-prohibitive and challenging to implement in a clinical setting. Now, a molecular computation strategy for classifying complex gene expression signatures has been developed. Classification occurs through a series of molecular interactions between RNA inputs and engineered DNA probes designed to implement a relevant linear classification model.

  • Randolph Lopez
  • , Ruofan Wang
  •  & Georg Seelig