Articles in 2015

Although resveratrol is thought to provide many beneficial health effects, its cellular targets and mechanism of function are still under investigation. A new study found that resveratrol binds to tyrosyl transfer-RNA synthetase, resulting in the activation of the stress response effector PARP1.

The physical arrangement of enzymes within native metabolic pathways is emerging as an important but underexplored area of molecular biology. Recent advances in mass spectrometry enabled confirmation of the proposal that the Krebs cycle enzymes form a complex and suggest that substrate channeling is the most likely benefit to this structural arrangement.

Microbial natural products and the specific subset with antibiotic activity, 'the antibiotic'ome', consist of a dizzying array of structures and exert their effects by many known modes of action. In this issue, Cociancich et al. describe a unique natural product that—along with a compound identified in a recent publication by Baumann et al.—defines a new antibacterial chemical scaffold that acts on a rarely hit target, DNA gyrase subunit A.

Aggregation of α-synuclein (αSN) is critical to the development of Parkinson's disease (PD), but the role of membranes in this process has been unclear and controversial. Galvagnion et al. demonstrate and model how lipids can stimulate αSN aggregation over a narrow range of lipid:protein stoichiometries.

This Perspective describes the different modes by which bacteria belonging to a population can achieve resistance to antibiotic treatments that are otherwise lethal to individual cells and suggests that such mechanisms of collective antibiotic tolerance can be targeted for development of antimicrobials.

A screen for compounds that inhibit disulfide bond formation in β-galactosidase in Escherichia coli found inhibitors of the membrane enzyme DsbB. Given the importance of DsbB in bacterial virulence, the inhibitors are potentially useful as antibacterials.

N-linked glycosylation of a conserved arginine in the translation elongation factor EF-P by a newly discovered rhamnosyltransferase EarP is needed to rescue ribosomal stalling at polyproline-encoding sequences in β-proteobacteria and other species.

Modification of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system by the addition of the light inducible proteins CRY2 and CIBI1 enables blue light–mediated transcription of endogenous genes in mammalian cells.

A series of designed peptides call the sphere of influence of the helix macrodipole into question, showing that the favorable rotamers allowed by K→E hydrogen bonds beat out the entropically penalized but macrodipole-aligned E→K hydrogen bonds.

Small unilamellar vesicles composed of the negatively charged lipid DMPS enhance the aggregation of the Lewy Body disease protein α-synuclein by increasing the rate of primary nucleation by a thousandfold.

RNA has been used in a variety of synthetic biology circuits but never as a transcriptional activator. Two design strategies using synthetic and natural sequences now lead to RNA activators, enabling RNA-only logic gates.