281 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 reveals that cellular stress triggers caspase-mediated cleavage of the general transcription factor TFIIB, which destabilizes transcription complexes to specifically downregulate short, stimulus-responsive genes and thereby prevent aberrant cell proliferation during stress resolution.
This study reveals that BRD4 acts as a critical repressor of developmental and neuronal genes by interacting with Polycomb complexes (PRC1.6 and EED) at bivalent promoters, where its recruitment via H3K14ac/H3K23ac prevents premature gene activation and ensures proper neuronal cell fate, thereby explaining how BRD4 loss-of-function mutations cause congenital neurodevelopmental disorders.
By integrating molecular dynamics simulations, Bayesian Network modeling, and BRET assays, this study reveals that conserved residues at the Gα–Gβγ interface exhibit subtype-specific coupling mechanisms driven by local microenvironments and allosteric effects, challenging the assumption that sequence conservation guarantees functional equivalence.
This study demonstrates that chromatin modifiers KMT2D, BAF, and p300 are not merely downstream effectors but are functionally required for the de novo binding of transcription factors like MyoD and the Glucocorticoid Receptor to enhancers, revealing a cooperative rather than hierarchical mechanism in enhancer establishment.
This study reveals that *Nigrospora* species, rather than the previously assumed *Pseudocercospora fijiensis*, are the predominant causal agents of leaf spot disease in Cavendish bananas in Mindanao, Philippines, necessitating a comprehensive review of current disease management strategies.
This study identifies the coccidian-specific helical repeat protein mRSiC as an essential factor in *Toxoplasma gondii* that stabilizes mitochondrial sRNAs to ensure the accumulation of fragmented rRNAs, thereby supporting functional respiratory chain assembly and parasite proliferation.
PartiNet is a dynamic, size-agnostic AI framework for cryo-EM particle picking that accelerates inference up to 7-fold by adapting network complexity to micrograph quality, thereby eliminating manual parameter tuning while delivering superior precision, recall, and high-resolution structural reconstructions.
The paper introduces BiHiTo, a biomolecular hierarchy-inspired tokenizer that utilizes a multi-codebook quantizer to mimic natural structural assembly levels, achieving state-of-the-art performance in reconstructing and generating large-scale biomolecular structures with significantly improved accuracy and interpretability.
This study reveals that EZH2 drives melanoma metastasis through a non-canonical, methyltransferase-independent interaction with TRIM28 to upregulate the heparan sulfate-modifying enzyme SULF1, thereby remodeling the extracellular matrix to enhance cell migration and invasion.
This study demonstrates that in MCF7 breast cancer cells, the pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-1β enhances IGFL1 translation through a specific G-rich region within its 3' untranslated region, revealing a novel post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism in the inflammatory tumor microenvironment.