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 demonstrates that the Hepatitis B virus basal core promoter (BCP) mutation enhances viral replication and transcriptionally reprograms hepatocytes to activate cancer-related pathways, thereby defining a distinct molecular subtype of hepatocellular carcinoma.
This study identifies two specific clusters of surface-exposed residues within the SARS-CoV-2 nsp1 N-terminal domain that are essential for distinguishing viral mRNA from host mRNA and for triggering mRNA decay, thereby explaining how the virus evades its own translational repression mechanism.
This study demonstrates that the opioid antagonist naloxone rescues mitochondrial morphology and restores vascularization in a 3D bioprinted model of LCHADD/VLCADD by inhibiting NOX2-driven oxidative stress, suggesting its potential as a rescue therapy for metabolic crises in these patients.
This study reveals that positive selection in human proteins predominantly targets exposed extracellular regions and pathogen-interaction interfaces, suggesting that host-pathogen conflicts drive adaptive evolution while identifying these evolutionarily selected residues as promising therapeutic targets.
This study identifies the *Wolbachia pipientis* protein WD0754 as a key factor that confers resistance to viral infection in *Drosophila melanogaster* by activating the host's IMD signaling pathway.
This study identifies LARP1-DM15/Sgt as a reader complex that recognizes cap-adjacent 2'-O-ribose methylation (cOMe) on TOP ribosomal protein mRNAs to stabilize them and facilitate their localization to Drosophila synapses, thereby supporting local protein synthesis for sustained synaptic function.
This study demonstrates that hepatitis E virus variants with different hypervariable region (HVR) insertions elicit distinct innate immune responses in primary human hepatocytes, with the HVR duplication variant triggering a significantly weaker antiviral response and suggesting a positive correlation between viral replication and host immune induction.
The study introduces a multi-vector RNA End Joining (REJ) system that utilizes the cell's intrinsic spliceosome to reassemble large therapeutic proteins from split AAV vectors, demonstrating efficient, safe, and effective restoration of dystrophin expression to prevent muscle degeneration in Duchenne muscular dystrophy models.
This study reveals that while DNA-PK inhibitors moderately increase large on-target deletions in edited human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells without substantially elevating genome-wide structural variations, the inherent risks of editing-induced structural variations necessitate careful safety assessments for all therapeutic protocols, particularly those involving multiple simultaneous edits.
This study reveals that the Pmk1 MAP kinase orchestrates rice blast infection by regulating a transcriptional network involving the Mst12 and Bip1 factors, which collectively coordinate appressorium function, effector deployment, and invasive growth in *Magnaporthe oryzae*.