Related papers: Differential stoichiometry among core ribosomal pr…
The structure of proteins is essential for its function. The determination of protein structures is possible by experimental or predicted by computational methods, but also a combination of both approaches is possible. Here, first an…
Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used…
Genetic feedback loops in cells break detailed balance and involve bimolecular reactions; hence exact solutions revealing the nature of the stochastic fluctuations in these loops are lacking. We here consider the master equation for a gene…
Revealing the structure of complex biological macromolecules, such as proteins, is an essential step for understanding the chemical mechanisms that determine the diversity of their functions. Synchrotron based x-ray crystallography and…
Protein-stabilised emulsion gels can be studied in the theoretical framework of colloidal gels, because both protein assemblies and droplets may be considered as soft colloids. These particles differ in their nature, size and softness, and…
Biological functions stem from coordinated interactions among proteins, nucleic acids and small molecules. Mass spectrometry technologies for reliable, high throughput single-cell proteomics will add a new modality to genomics and enable…
The growing interest for comparing protein internal dynamics owes much to the realization that protein function can be accompanied or assisted by structural fluctuations and conformational changes. Analogously to the case of functional…
Auto-regulatory feedback loops are one of the most common network motifs. A wide variety of stochastic models have been constructed to understand how the fluctuations in protein numbers in these loops are influenced by the kinetic…
Impedance Spectroscopy resolves electrical properties into uncorrelated variables, as a function of frequency, with exquisite resolution. Separation is robust and most useful when the system is linear. Impedance spectroscopy combined with…
Synthetic copolymers and biopolymers, such as polypeptides and double-stranded DNA, often exhibit strong variations in bending stiffness along their contour, which can significantly impact conformational behavior at larger scales. To…
Translation is one of the main steps in the synthesis of proteins. It consists of ribosomes that translate sequences of nucleotides encoded on mRNA into polypeptide sequences of amino acids. Ribosomes bound to mRNA move unidirectionally,…
The intrinsic stochasticity of gene expression can lead to large variability in protein levels for genetically identical cells. Such variability in protein levels can arise from infrequent synthesis of mRNAs which in turn give rise to…
The analysis of the three-dimensional structure of proteins is an important topic in molecular biochemistry. Structure plays a critical role in defining the function of proteins and is more strongly conserved than amino acid sequence over…
Understanding the patterns and causes of phenotypic divergence is a central goal in evolutionary biology. Much work has shown that mRNA abundance is highly variable between closely related species. However, the extent and mechanisms of…
The spectrum and scale of fluctuations in protein structures affect the range of cell phenomena, including stability of protein structures or their fragments, allosteric transitions and energy transfer. The study presents a…
Throughout the history of electron microscopy, ribosomes have served as an ideal subject for imaging and technological development, which in turn has driven our understanding of ribosomal biology. Here, we provide a historical perspective…
Homeostasis of protein concentrations in cells is crucial for their proper functioning, and this requires concentrations (at their steady-state levels) to be stable to fluctuations. Since gene expression is regulated by proteins such as…
The number of ribosomes in a cell is considered as limiting, and gene expression is thus largely determined by their cellular concentration. In this work we develop a toy model to study the trade-off between the ribosomal supply and the…
The human proteome is enriched in proteins that do not fold into a stable 3D structure. These intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) spontaneously fluctuate between a large number of configurations in their native form. Remarkably, the…
The structure of DNA in the nucleosome core particle is studied using an elastic model that incorporates anisotropy in the bending energetics and twist-bend coupling. Using the experimentally determined structure of nucleosomal DNA [T.J.…