361 papers
Cell biology is the study of life at its most fundamental unit: the cell. This field explores how these microscopic building blocks function, communicate, and replicate to sustain living organisms, from the simplest bacteria to complex human tissues. By understanding the machinery inside a cell, scientists unlock secrets about growth, disease, and the very nature of existence itself.
At Gist.Science, we track every new preprint uploaded to bioRxiv within this dynamic category. Our team processes each submission to provide both accessible plain-language explanations and detailed technical summaries, ensuring you can grasp complex discoveries without getting lost in dense jargon. Below are the latest papers in cell biology, offering a fresh look at the inner workings of life as they are shared with the world.
The RNA helicase Aquarius (AQR) maintains pluripotent stem cell identity by safeguarding a resilient replication program that resolves transcription-replication conflicts and R-loops, thereby preventing transcriptional instability and the loss of cell identity.
By comparing cell cultures of the Antarctic plunderfish and a temperate shanny, researchers discovered that while basic subcellular organization and organelle dynamics are conserved in extreme cold, Antarctic fish exhibit specific morphological adaptations in lysosomes and mitochondria that may relate to their unique biological challenges.
By characterizing a series of *pcyt-1* mutant alleles in *C. elegans*, this study demonstrates that graded reductions in phosphatidylcholine synthesis trigger compensatory lipid remodeling toward long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids and cause specific physiological vulnerabilities, particularly in the germline, without activating canonical cellular stress pathways.
This study demonstrates that the combination of cellular senescence and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) creates a dysfunctional antiviral state in lung fibroblasts, characterized by altered interferon responses and reduced reliance on key transcription factors like IRF3 and STAT1, which explains the heightened susceptibility of IPF patients to viral infections and acute exacerbations.
This study reveals that in budding yeast, the nuclear enzyme Pct1 acts as a lipid sensor that couples phosphatidylcholine synthesis to membrane biogenesis by reversibly associating with the inner nuclear membrane in response to lipid packing defects, thereby preventing uncontrolled organelle growth when homeostasis is disrupted.
This study demonstrates that physiological oxidative stress does not interfere with ADO-catalyzed N-terminal cysteine-dependent proteolysis of RGS4/5, while cytotoxic oxidative stress stabilizes these proteins through an N-terminal cysteine-independent mechanism potentially linked to ferroptosis.
By integrating single-nucleus multimodal profiling with experimental validation, this study reveals that NFIA and NFIB transcription factors drive the bifurcation of hiPSCs from a neurogenic to a chondrogenic cell fate, offering critical insights for advancing regenerative cartilage therapies.
This paper presents an interpretable 3D Bag-of-Visual-Words pipeline that extracts biologically meaningful features from complex volumetric microscopy data to enable accurate classification and localization of discriminative structures across diverse imaging conditions.
This study presents the first characterization of organelle inheritance in the multi-budding yeast *Aureobasidium pullulans*, revealing that while mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum are evenly distributed to all buds, vacuoles and peroxisomes are inherited variably, a mechanism potentially crucial for the fungus's adaptability to diverse environments.
By curating and analyzing the topological determinants of nearly 5,000 human membrane proteins, this study reveals that single-pass and multipass proteins exhibit distinct structural patterns, with the TMD-pair serving as a key functional building block for multipass proteins, thereby offering new insights into the biogenesis, evolution, and engineering of membrane proteomes.