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 aclarubicin selectively disrupts RNA polymerase II progression at replication-coupled histone genes due to their dense transcriptional activity, causing nonproductive polymerase accumulation and establishing these loci as key targets for the drug's chromatin-based anticancer mechanism.
This study demonstrates that maternal obesity induces persistent, sex-dependent epigenetic and transcriptomic reprogramming in the offspring heart, leading to severe pathological cardiac remodeling in males but adaptive responses in females.
This paper reports the discovery of ancient VIPR systems, which utilize a noncontiguous RNA code to recognize gapped DNA targets for programmable phage defense, suggesting that the evolutionary roots of CRISPR-based adaptive immunity lie in ancient viral warfare.
The paper introduces SELECT-seq, a rapid, one-pot single-cell workflow that integrates SNP-specific enrichment with whole-transcriptome sequencing to efficiently establish causal genotype-phenotype relationships without laborious cloning steps.
This study reveals that HIV-1 capsid binding induces long-range conformational remodeling in the intrinsically disordered protein PQBP1, shifting its structural ensemble to a state competent for recruiting cGAS and thereby linking viral capsid recognition to innate immune activation.
This study demonstrates that inserting an adenosine nucleotide directly upstream of an intrinsic terminator's hairpin significantly enhances protein production and reduces read-through in *E. coli*, a finding validated through systematic engineering and a predictive machine learning model.
This study integrates multi-omics approaches to reveal that the ER-PM contact site protein SYT1 anchors the monolignol biosynthetic complex, thereby optimizing monolignol export for stress-induced lignin deposition.
This study utilizes comparative extracellular proteomics to reveal a nitrogen-responsive secretion profile in *Anabaena*, providing the first evidence of a novel, heterocyst-specific protein export pathway that challenges the classical signal peptide model and offers new avenues for engineering sustainable photosynthetic protein production.
This study demonstrates that the chimeric adenovirus Ad5F35 can efficiently transduce primary human natural killer cells by targeting the CD46 receptor, with transduction efficiency directly correlating to cell-surface CD46 density, which is significantly lower in lymphocytes than in epithelial cells.
The authors developed and validated Tension TRAAKer, a chemigenetic dual-color fluorescent reporter that enables rapid, reversible, and genetically targetable visualization of membrane tension dynamics in living cells by coupling a tension-sensitive TRAAK channel variant with a fluorogenic HaloTag dye.