231 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 lauric acid exhibits significant antiviral activity against Dengue virus serotype 2 by inhibiting viral RNA replication and translation in a replicon assay, although its therapeutic potential is currently limited by cytotoxicity at effective concentrations.
This paper presents a modular, cost-effective, and open-source cryogenic fluorescence microscope designed for super-resolution correlative light and electron microscopy that achieves high localization precision and stability while minimizing ice contamination.
This paper introduces EntDetect, an open-source computational tool and accompanying webserver designed to identify non-covalent lasso entanglements (NCLEs) in protein structures and simulation trajectories, enabling the detection of misfolded states and integration with mass spectrometry data to advance the study of protein topology and misfolding.
This paper argues that lethal mutagenesis sets an upper bound on mutation rates and demonstrates that coding genome size, body mass, generation time, and temperature collectively explain over 90% of the variation in mutation rates across the Tree of Life, indicating that organisms with larger genomes and longer lifespans have evolved novel mechanisms to minimize germline mutations.
This paper presents a safer, high-sensitivity fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) protocol for cryosections that replaces toxic reagents with low-toxicity alternatives while enabling multiplexed mRNA detection, preserving tissue integrity without proteolytic enzymes, and allowing simultaneous immunostaining.
This study introduces a targeted 3'-end RNA sequencing method (3TRS) that reveals how long, pure, and somatically unstable CAG repeats in Huntington's disease drive the expression of the pathogenic HTT1a isoform through cryptic polyadenylation, offering a robust framework for investigating disease mechanisms and therapeutic strategies.
This study identifies RSK1 as a central, GSK3β-independent mediator that drives Tau phosphorylation in response to both HIV and cocaine exposure, revealing a convergent signaling mechanism that contributes to neurocognitive dysfunction and suggesting RSK1 inhibition as a potential therapeutic strategy for Tau-associated pathologies.
Based on 15 years of breeding data from southern Sweden, this study reveals that avian malaria prevalence in blue tits is significantly shaped by host age, sex, and local habitat, with infection rates increasing over time and accumulating in older birds, thereby underscoring the critical value of long-term research for understanding host-parasite dynamics.
This study characterizes the functional impacts of specific RNase R mutations on RNA binding and degradation while providing a detailed, cost-effective protocol for purifying high-quality recombinant RNase R in E. coli using standard FPLC systems to facilitate circRNA research and therapeutic development.
This study demonstrates that frataxin depletion in dorsal root ganglia sensory neurons causes a reduction in soma size driven by mitochondrial dysfunction-induced AMPK hyperactivation and mTOR suppression, a phenotype that can be rescued by restoring frataxin, inhibiting AMPK, or treating with alpha-lipoic acid.