A Short Report allows authors to publish the results of a small number of experiments, provided the conclusion is clear and justified, and the findings are novel and judged to be of high importance.
The catalytic activation of the Cas9 HNH domain involves a unique conformational change in the ββα-metal motif that is collectively driven by the interactions with the metal ions and DNA.
The identification of ACNQ as an extracellular electron shuttle solves a longstanding problem in bacterial physiology and provides new tool for bioenergy development.
Identification of the R(+)-propranolol enantiomer as an inhibitor of the SOX18 transcription factor activity breaks open potential of drug repurposing in vascular diseases.
Evolutionary reconstruction of the ecdysis pathway shows that its major elements are present in the majority of metazoans, providing evidence that they originated much earlier than currently assumed.
Hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry reveals nucleotide-driven conformational regulation of Sec protein-channel to help impose directionality for protein transport through the Sec complex.
Analysis of published studies reveals that flagellates and ciliates separately exhibit log-normal distributions of swimming speeds, and rescaling by the mean speed of each collapses them to a universal relationship.
