316 papers
Molecular biology explores the tiny machinery inside living cells, revealing how genetic instructions are read, copied, and turned into the proteins that keep us alive. This field acts as a bridge between the static code of DNA and the dynamic processes that drive growth, disease, and life itself, offering insights into everything from cellular repair to the development of new medicines.
On Gist.Science, we track every new preprint uploaded to bioRxiv in this category to make these complex discoveries accessible to everyone. Our team processes each submission to provide both clear, plain-language explanations and detailed technical summaries, ensuring you can grasp the core findings without getting lost in dense academic jargon.
Below are the latest molecular biology papers freshly processed from bioRxiv, ready for you to explore and understand.
This study identifies Evangelion, a widespread family of DUF4062-based anti-phage defence systems enriched on antimicrobial-resistance plasmids that function by sensing phage replication to trigger NAD depletion and abortive infection, thereby revealing a novel mobile defence mechanism discovered through phenotype-guided interrogation.
This study demonstrates that bacterial strain identity, rather than specific defense systems or phage tail genes, is the primary driver of phage infectivity in cystic fibrosis-associated *Achromobacter*, highlighting the critical need for quantitative phenotyping of individual phage-host pairs to guide rational therapy design.
This study systematically maps the functional impacts of nearly all possible CPOX amino acid substitutions under both normal and mercury-exposed conditions to resolve the classification of uncertain variants, reveal environment-dependent pathogenicity, and provide a comprehensive resource for understanding Hereditary Coproporphyria.
The paper demonstrates that the predictive performance of deep-learning models for perturbation responses is fundamentally limited by the information captured in the projection basis, revealing that while PCA effectively models chemical perturbations by capturing high-variance modes, network-based bases are superior for genetic perturbations, and graph wavelets can unify both by accessing the full graph spectrum.
This study reveals an evolutionarily conserved negative feedback loop in neurons where the ELAV protein promotes the production of long 3'UTR mRNA isoforms that are subsequently translationally repressed by Pumilio, a mechanism essential for maintaining proteostasis, ensuring developmental viability, and conferring stress resilience.
This study reveals that aclarubicin selectively disrupts RNA polymerase II progression at replication-coupled histone genes due to their dense transcriptional activity, causing nonproductive polymerase accumulation and establishing these loci as key targets for the drug's chromatin-based anticancer mechanism.
This study demonstrates that maternal obesity induces persistent, sex-dependent epigenetic and transcriptomic reprogramming in the offspring heart, leading to severe pathological cardiac remodeling in males but adaptive responses in females.
This paper reports the discovery of ancient VIPR systems, which utilize a noncontiguous RNA code to recognize gapped DNA targets for programmable phage defense, suggesting that the evolutionary roots of CRISPR-based adaptive immunity lie in ancient viral warfare.
The paper introduces SELECT-seq, a rapid, one-pot single-cell workflow that integrates SNP-specific enrichment with whole-transcriptome sequencing to efficiently establish causal genotype-phenotype relationships without laborious cloning steps.
This study reveals that HIV-1 capsid binding induces long-range conformational remodeling in the intrinsically disordered protein PQBP1, shifting its structural ensemble to a state competent for recruiting cGAS and thereby linking viral capsid recognition to innate immune activation.