Molecular biophysics articles from across Nature Portfolio

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.

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.

Work by Klyshko and Kim et al. lays the foundation for simulating pump-probe experiments and demonstrates how the dynamic behaviour of proteins extends to the crystal environment, emphasizing the need for an ensemble view in understanding functional motions.

Here the authors perform modelling to reveal that the timescale of actin-VASP interactions plays a critical role in actin ring formation and filament length determines droplet deformation in VASP droplets: predictions from the model were tested against VASP GAB mutant.

Here, the authors dissect the fuzzy interaction between the prokaryote transcription factor HigA2 and its DNA target and show that specific, transient interactions drive specificity despite HigA2 remaining mostly disordered.

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.