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Cruz et al. present cryo-EM structures of large ribosomal subunit assembly intermediates that reveal how the DEAD-box helicase Spb4 remodels rRNA secondary structures to facilitate and guide 60S maturation.
Basu and colleagues comprehensively characterize how sequence and epigenetic modifications impact the local mechanical properties of DNA. The results suggest that DNA mechanics may have evolved to aid diverse DNA-deforming biological processes.
Here the authors use cryo-EM and biochemical analysis to show how the ancillary protein TPR-CHAT regulates the nuclease function of the CRISPR-guided nuclease Cas7-11.
Hall et al. discovered the molecular mechanism for the polarity of the CRISPR roadblock to transcription: RNA polymerase progression can collapse the R-loop formed by a bound dCas to allow read-through from the PAM-distal side. Guide RNA modifications allow modulation of the dCas R-loop stability.
This work provides molecular insights into the export of cyclic glucans by a bacterial ABC transporter. The findings expand our understanding of polysaccharide trafficking across bacterial membranes, as well as protein-sugar interactions in general.
Rengachari et al. provide a structural investigation of Pol II initiation at snRNA gene promoters and find that the snRNA-activating protein complex enables DNA opening and transcription initiation independent of TFIIE and TFIIH in vitro.
The voltage-gated sodium channel NaV1.7 plays essential roles in pain sensation. The authors report cryo-EM structures of NaV1.7 in complexes with three pore blockers, elucidating distinct mechanisms of action of their modulation on NaV1.7.
Cryo-EM structures of the transcription preinitiation complex in the presence of the +1 nucleosome show how the general transcription factor TFIIH can interact with the nucleosome at several positions.
Cryo-EM has facilitated structural studies of membrane proteins, but inactive GPCRs have remained inaccessible due to their small size. Robertson et al. demonstrate a common nanobody-based approach to streamline the determination of such structures.
Luan et al. find that CTCF shapes the transcriptional landscape in part by suppressing the initiation of upstream antisense transcription at hundreds of divergent gene promoters.
Schmidpeter and colleagues showed that anionic lipids bind to pacemaker ion channels and increase their activity by acting like keys that unlock salt bridges at the channel gates.
Here, the structure of poly(UG) RNA reveals an unusual left-handed quadruplex, or ‘pUG fold’. The pUG fold marks RNAs as vectors for gene silencing in C. elegans by recruiting RNA-dependent RNA polymerase for siRNA synthesis.
New research shows that the CoREST complex controls the acquisition of endocrine therapy resistance in estrogen receptor-positive breast cancers. Profiling data show that this resistance transition is accompanied by a functional retargeting of CoREST on chromatin in coordination with cJUN and SWI/SNF (cBAF).
Here, the authors evaluate the performance of AlphaFold2 and its predicted structures on common structural biological applications, including missense variants, function and ligand binding site prediction, modeling of interactions and modeling of experimental structural data.