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 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The authors have withdrawn their manuscript regarding a targeted mass-spectrometry plasma proteome for multi-disease screening due to an administrative issue concerning co-author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.
Using live-cell single-molecule tracking, this study reveals that in *E. coli*, MutH autonomously binds hemimethylated GATC sites near replication forks via a switch to slow-search mode, positioning itself to await activation by MutS-MutL for efficient DNA mismatch repair.
This study establishes a quantitative, transcriptome-wide framework using spike-in normalized Ribo-seq and Disome-seq to reveal that ribosome collisions comprise 2–10% of translating ribosomes under basal conditions and increase up to four-fold with stress-specific alterations in their distribution.
This study introduces Gd-hProCA32.Collagen, a novel collagen-targeted protein MRI contrast agent that enables the noninvasive, early detection and precise spatial mapping of subclinical renal and hepatic fibrosis in polycystic kidney disease models, outperforming conventional agents by identifying fibrotic changes before irreversible structural decline occurs.
This study demonstrates that the identity of a stressor, rather than just hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activation, is the primary determinant of the human plasma proteomic and metabolic response, with physical and combined stressors triggering robust, coordinated molecular changes and extracellular vesicle release that psychological stress alone fails to elicit.
This study reveals that human vault RNA paralogs exhibit diverse expression patterns and demonstrate inter-locus compensation through upregulation of vtRNA2-1 upon VTRNA1 knockout, while failing to replicate previously reported links to cell growth or viral infection, thereby suggesting a functional connection between these molecules that warrants further investigation.