414 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 paper introduces HiExM, a scalable high-throughput expansion microscopy pipeline that overcomes the trade-off between spatial resolution and sample size to enable robust, quantitative profiling of individual organelle morphology and spatial heterogeneity across large cell populations.
This study establishes a quantitative biochemical mechanism for Stu2/XMAP215-family microtubule polymerases by demonstrating that they function as efficient, enzyme-like tubulin-shuttling antennas whose activity is governed by TOG domain binding kinetics, revealing a case of convergent evolution with actin polymerases.
This study utilizes single-cell transcriptomics across multiple vascular injury and atherosclerosis models to demonstrate that a rare, pre-existing "Primed" SMC compartment, rather than widespread phenotypic switching of contractile SMCs, serves as the dominant source of lesion cellularity through autonomous self-renewal.
This study reveals that TIAM1 regulates the interplay between centriole assembly and autolysosome cycling by ensuring proper PLK4 organization on centrioles and maintaining lysosomal homeostasis, thereby linking TIAM1 to centrosome quality-control pathways.
This study presents a semi-automated approach using mTmG transgenic mice and 3D confocal microscopy to efficiently reconstruct and analyze glomerular architecture, thereby overcoming the labor-intensive limitations of manual segmentation in studying kidney disease.
This study demonstrates that local acidosis promotes passive fatty acid uptake in endothelial cells, leading to lipid accumulation, endoplasmic reticulum stress, and oxidative damage that impair nitric oxide availability and cause vascular dysfunction.
This study quantifies the temporal dynamics and metabolic flexibility of adrenergic signaling in primary human fibroblasts, revealing that norepinephrine initially triggers a rapid glycolytic surge followed by a sustained increase in oxidative phosphorylation to drive cellular energy expenditure, a process that is significantly impaired in cells with mitochondrial defects.
By combining CRISPR-Sirius time-lapse imaging with explainable machine learning, this study reveals that serum starvation triggers a chromosome-specific response where chromosome 1 loci migrate to the nuclear envelope and exhibit distinct dynamic behaviors, including differential responses between homologous chromosomes.
This paper demonstrates that an optimized expansion microscopy workflow enables multiscale, three-dimensional ultrastructural mapping of intestinal tissues and organoids, successfully revealing disease-specific phenotypes in microvillus inclusion disease models that were previously only detectable via electron microscopy.
This study presents the development and validation of the SISA4 fission yeast strain, a more stable and user-friendly tool that enables sustained, stress-independent activation of the Sty1 MAP kinase pathway to facilitate the dissection of its specific roles in cellular processes, such as its unexpected involvement in maintaining cell polarity disruption.