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.
This study identifies a non-lytic membrane permeabilization program called erebosis, mediated by the pore-forming protein Ninjurin A (NijA), which drives physiological enterocyte turnover in the Drosophila intestine by allowing transient protein exchange while preserving epithelial barrier integrity.
This study reveals that K-Ras4B regulates primary cilium dynamics in differentiating muscle cells by promoting ciliogenesis through PDE6D-mediated ciliary localization, while its AMPK-PKG2-dependent phosphorylation inhibits this interaction to facilitate differentiation.
This study establishes that pathogenic PTCD1 variants cause infantile cardiomyopathy by disrupting mitoribosome biogenesis, which leads to toxic mitochondrial protein aggregation and network remodeling in post-mitotic tissues.
This study utilizes high-resolution spatial and single-cell transcriptomics to map the full-thickness human endometrium, revealing that menstrual breakdown and regeneration occur concurrently through a coordinated basalis-to-luminal gradient driven by a distinct, long-lived progenitor niche.
This study reveals that in cisplatin-resistant head and neck squamous carcinoma cells, DNA polymerase kappa (Polκ) mitigates drug toxicity not primarily through lesion bypass, but by forming two critical axes with PCNA—Polδ to drive proliferation and USP18 to stabilize DNA repair proteins and replication forks—thereby maintaining genomic stability and offering a novel therapeutic target.
The paper introduces SubCell, a proteome-aware deep learning model trained on the Human Protein Atlas that outperforms existing methods in capturing single-cell biology, generalizes across datasets without fine-tuning, and enables the construction of a proteome-wide hierarchical map of cellular organization while enhancing gene function prediction through multimodal integration with protein sequences.
This study demonstrates that inhibiting the intestinal enzyme ketohexokinase (KHK) blocks fructose-driven unsaturated fat absorption and synergizes with GLP-1 receptor agonists to promote significant weight loss, revealing fructose metabolism as a critical regulator of dietary lipid handling and obesity.
The study demonstrates that the yeast nuclear envelope protein Msc1 accumulates at nucleus-vacuole junctions during the diauxic shift to exclude nuclear pore complexes from these sites, thereby maintaining nuclear pore homeostasis as cells enter quiescence.
This study reveals that SF3B1 mutations drive tumorigenesis by enhancing a pathological U1-U3 snRNA-snoRNA interaction that mislocalizes SETD2 to chromatin-associated RNAs, causing aberrant chromatin remodeling, R-loop formation, and genome instability, which can be therapeutically targeted by blocking this specific RNA pairing.
This study identifies TMEM55B as a critical regulator that, in complex with PDZD8 at ER-lysosome membrane contact sites, coordinates lysosomal acidification and calcium signaling to drive lipolysis and cholesterol metabolism.