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 cryo-electron microscopy to reveal the structure of the apo-PIWIL4-HSP90 complex, demonstrating that HSP90 binds and unfolds the PIWI linker domain to stabilize a unique open conformation, a mechanism conserved across PIWI proteins and essential for piRNA biogenesis.
This study demonstrates that dynamic histone lysine methylation and demethylation in the wood frog liver serve as a critical epigenetic mechanism for transcriptional regulation, enabling the animal's survival during prolonged anoxia and freezing by modulating gene expression to support hypometabolism and stress adaptation.
This study demonstrates that pharmacologically inducing autophagy with rapamycin accelerates intestinal repair and improves survival in mice following acute whole-body irradiation, whereas inhibiting autophagy with chloroquine exacerbates radiation-induced gastrointestinal injury.
This study characterizes the aging plasma extracellular vesicle proteome in mice using a species-agnostic mass spectrometry approach, revealing age-correlated protein signatures, sex-specific differences, and novel biomarkers that enable the construction of a highly accurate proteomic clock for monitoring aging and healthspan.
FlexRibbon is a novel protein foundation model that jointly pretrains on amino acid sequences and 3D structures using a combination of masked language modeling and diffusion-based denoising, achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks—particularly in mutation-rich regimes where traditional MSA-based methods struggle—without relying on multiple sequence alignments.
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.