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 utilizes unique molecular identifiers and spike-ins to characterize the selective, protein-associated, and capacitation-responsive dynamics of small RNAs in mouse sperm, thereby resolving technical biases and clarifying the molecular factors that shape the sperm small RNA repertoire.
Through structure-guided design, researchers developed potent branched C7-substituted 7-deaza-SAH analogues that occupy the entire SAM-binding pocket of mpox virus VP39 and dengue virus NS5 methyltransferases, demonstrating a versatile strategy for inhibiting structurally distinct viral enzymes.
The paper introduces Ptarmigan-1, a structure-free, site-resolved contrastive learning model that enables rapid and accurate virtual screening across diverse protein targets—including cryptic and disordered sites—by directly embedding protein sequences and 2D chemical structures without requiring explicit 3D pose construction.
This study demonstrates that experimental design factors, specifically bioreactor type and carbon substrate complexity, significantly influence aquatic bacterial metabolic rate estimates derived from RNA quantitative stable isotope probing (qSIP), thereby offering critical guidance for future applications of this method in aquatic environments.
This study utilizes cryo-electron microscopy to reveal the structural and mechanistic basis of translation initiation on the poliovirus IRES, identifying critical interactions between IRES domain IVc and ribosomal proteins uS19/uS13, as well as a conserved GNRA tetraloop engaging the initiator tRNA, which are essential for viral replication.
This study reveals that in fission yeast, the Replication Protein A (RPA) complex forms a critical ternary assembly with telomerase (Trt1/TERT) and the shelterin component Tpz1/TPP1 to drive productive telomere extension and suppress recombination, a mechanism likely conserved across humans and budding yeast.
The authors have withdrawn their manuscript regarding a targeted mass-spectrometry plasma proteome for multi-disease screening due to an administrative issue concerning co-author consent, and they request that the work not be cited.
This study reveals that intestinal inflammation and cancer oppositely remodel the b0,+ selenium-utilization axis, where inflammation suppresses b0,+ expression to induce a ferroptosis-prone dedifferentiated state in Crohn's disease, while cancer bypasses this pathway to activate an xCT-mediated antioxidant program that confers ferroptosis resistance.
This study introduces "Sleeping ORANGE," a novel hybrid system combining the CRISPR-based ORANGE technique with Sleeping Beauty transposase, which significantly enhances endogenous protein tagging efficiency by approximately 12.85-fold in HEK293 cells compared to the original method.
This study demonstrates that sex and race significantly influence serum protein concentrations in healthy individuals, revealing that current population-agnostic reference intervals can misclassify up to 25% of specific demographic subgroups as abnormal and highlighting the urgent need to incorporate demographic context into diagnostic thresholds.