Biophysical and structural studies reveal how low piconewton forces across actin enhance binding by the critical cell-cell adhesion protein α-catenin versus its force insensitive homolog vinculin.
Small molecule inhibitors identified in a biophysical high-throughout screening assay confirm the importance of the interaction between single-stranded DNA and the protein RAD52 for the survival of BRCA2-depleted cells.
The rate of DNA unwinding by RecQ helicases is dramatically modulated by the DNA duplex stability in a geometry-dependent manner, providing an intrinsic mechanism for suppressing illegitimate recombination.
Binding of multiple LC8 copies to the intrinsically disordered region of the transcription factor ASCIZ exemplifies a new and potentially widespread molecular mechanism for negative feedback regulation.
Efficient nuclear transport of very large biomolecules, relevant for viral transport, scales non-linearly with size and its kinetics can be explained by a simple two-parameter energetic model.
Hemoglobin affinity and cooperativity reveal mechanistic insights in how the relation between physiology and evolutionary variations shape a protein's molecular property.
The scanning-assisted clustering mechanism of IFI16 not only allows efficient assembly on exposed foreign-dsDNA, but also suppresses the engagement of chromatinized self-dsDNA.
New biophysical methods and analyses visualize in real-time a chain of coordinated single-molecular events on a living cell, enabling the inner workings of a mechanoreceptor important to biology to be elucidated.
ArcLight, a popular optogenetic reporter of voltage, is studied at both single-molecule and macroscopic levels, which leads to new mechanistic understanding and to the rational design of a faster reporter.
