Related papers: Bacterial pathways for the biosynthesis of ubiquin…

Enzymes are on the front lines of evolution. All living organisms rely on highly efficient, specific enzymes for growth, sustenance, and reproduction; and many diseases are a consequence of a mutation on an enzyme that affects its catalytic…

Glycosylation is a highly complex process to produce a diverse repertoire of cellular glycans that are attached to proteins and lipids. Glycans are involved in fundamental biological processes, including protein folding and clearance, cell…

Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…

Propagating spiral waves have been discovered in various chemical, biological and physical systems. Spiral waves in multicellular organisms are often associated with essential living functions. Although certain eukaryotic microorganisms…

Bacteriocins are peptide-derived molecules produced by bacteria, whose recently-discovered functions include virulence factors and signalling molecules as well as their better known roles as antibiotics. To date, close to five hundred…

Biological nanomachines are nanometer-size macromolecular complexes that catalyze chemical reactions in the presence of substrate molecules. The catalytic functions carried out by such nanomachines in the cytoplasm, and biological membranes…

Eukaryotic cells and intracellular pathogens such as bacteria or viruses utilize the actin polymerization machinery to propel themselves forward. Thereby, the onset of motion and choice of direction may be the result of a spontaneous…

Mechanical unfolding and refolding of ubiquitin are studied by Monte Carlo simulations of a Go model with binary variables. The exponential dependence of the time constants on the force is verified, and folding and unfolding lengths are…

Owing to the complexity of higher eukaryotic cells, a complete proteome is likely to be very difficult to achieve. However, advantage can be taken of the cell compartmentalization to build organelle proteomes, which can moreover be viewed…

Living tissue is able to withstand large stresses in everyday life, yet it also actively adapts to dynamic loads. This remarkable mechanical behaviour emerges from the interplay between living cells and their non-living extracellular…

We review the status of protein-based molecular electronics. First we discuss fundamental concepts of electron transfer and transport in and across proteins and proposed mechanisms for these processes. We then describe the immobilization of…

Biological systems are known to communicate by diffusing chemical signals in the surrounding medium. However, most of the recent literature has neglected the electron transfer mechanism occurring amongst living cells, and its role in…

Immotile microbes inhabit nearly every environment on Earth, from soils and sediments to food matrices -- yet how they disperse through these physically confining environments is poorly understood. Here, we show that immotile microbial…

Nucleic acids and proteins are not only biologically important polymers: They have recently been recognized as novel functional materials surpassing in many aspects the conventional ones. Although Herculean efforts have been undertaken to…

Living cells are soft bodies of a characteristic form, but endowed with a capacity for a steady turnover of their structures. Both of these material properties, i.e. recovery of the shape after an external stress has been imposed and…

The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…

Bacterial microcompartments are large, roughly icosahedral shells that assemble around enzymes and reactants involved in certain metabolic pathways in bacteria. Motivated by microcompartment assembly, we use coarse-grained computational and…

Systems biology and whole-cell modelling are demanding increasingly comprehensive mathematical models of cellular biochemistry. These models require the development of simplified models of specific processes which capture essential…

Thylakoid membranes are the site of oxygenic photosynthesis, one of the most important biochemical processes on earth. The ancestral state of these membranes is represented today in Gloeobacterales, where they are lacking and photosynthesis…

Bioelectrochemical systems are electrochemical cells that rely on conductive biofilms covering an electrode. We consider the example of a microbial fuel cell, and we derive a dynamic model of ion transport, biochemical reactions and…