388 papers
Biophysics sits at the fascinating intersection where the laws of physics meet the complexity of living systems. This field uses tools like light, electricity, and mechanical forces to decode how cells move, how proteins fold, and how our senses translate the world around us. Rather than just observing biology, biophysicists measure and model life to understand the fundamental machinery that powers every organism.
On Gist.Science, we make these discoveries accessible by curating the latest preprints directly from bioRxiv. Our team processes every new submission in this category, providing both clear, plain-language overviews and detailed technical summaries so readers of all backgrounds can grasp the cutting-edge science. Below are the most recent biophysics papers from bioRxiv, ready for you to explore.
This study introduces a targeted hydrogen-bond correction (gHBfix-18Ab*) to AMBER RNA force fields that resolves the erroneous preference for non-native base-triple states in the MAPT A-bulge motif, successfully restoring the experimentally observed stacked conformation while preserving the stability of other RNA structures.
This study demonstrates that the functional divergence of paralogous proteins FCHO1 and FCHO2 arises from the evolutionary acquisition of a transient helical structure within an intrinsically disordered region, which confers new self-association capabilities to FCHO1 while preserving the ancestral membrane-binding activity shared by both proteins.
By combining engineered DNA-braiding substrates, angular optical trap measurements, and Monte Carlo simulations, this study demonstrates that the geometric separation of DNA strands at the replication fork dictates whether the replisome rotates to partition supercoiling behind it or remains stationary to accumulate stress ahead, thereby revealing a physical mechanism by which DNA geometry regulates replication dynamics and topological stress management.
This study demonstrates that temperature replica-exchange molecular dynamics (T-REMD) outperforms conventional and other enhanced sampling methods in generating experimentally validated RNA conformational ensembles, successfully recovering rare functional substates and improving ligand screening across diverse structural contexts.
This study elucidates how cholesterol inhibits the human voltage-gated proton channel (hHv1) by altering S4 conformational dynamics, a mechanism attenuated by its precursor desmosterol and mediated by specific residues like Y141, thereby linking sterol metabolism to cellular pH homeostasis.
This paper introduces a reciprocal space kinetic decomposition framework that isolates weak transient structural signals in time-resolved serial crystallography by separating data according to predefined kinetic models, thereby enhancing the mechanistic interpretation of ultrafast protein dynamics while maintaining compatibility with standard structure refinement workflows.
This study demonstrates that cardiolipin enrichment in mitochondrial membranes significantly increases surface proton concentration and facilitates the propagation of reversible, autocatalytic acidification fronts, a mechanism that may enhance the efficiency of ATP regeneration by optimizing local pH for respiratory chain and ATP synthase activities.
The paper introduces BENDER, a cross-taxon simulation database of over 11,000 intrinsically disordered protein sequences that demonstrates the reliability of current force fields across the tree of life and reveals conserved physical laws governing sequence-ensemble relationships, such as hub topology in contact networks, beyond human-specific evolutionary peculiarities.
This paper presents two improved steady-state models for estimating near-term fetal internal temperatures by incorporating anatomical segmentation and a new placental-umbilical heat-exchanger representation, successfully predicting fetal temperatures to be slightly higher than maternal core levels and providing a foundation for future transient maternal-fetal thermoregulation studies.
This study introduces a general experiment-simulation framework utilizing dual-direction tether pulling on giant plasma membrane vesicles to directly measure the effective spontaneous curvature of native cellular membranes and quantify the curvature imprints of individual proteins, thereby overcoming previous challenges in characterizing this crucial material property in complex biological systems.