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Decades of research have identified the biochemical basis of many plant specialized metabolic pathways. This Review highlights the biological context of these pathways and how recent advances have extended the new frontiers of phytochemistry.
This Review highlights the latest progress on the molecular basis of metabolite signals in regulating aging and longevity, as well as state-of-the-art technological advances in studying bioactive metabolites.
Graspetides are an important class of ribosomal natural products with potent bioactivities. New structural information provides insights into substrate recognition and catalysis, including a rare glimpse into the interactions between a tailoring enzyme and the core of the precursor peptide.
LYTACs induce selective degradation of extracellular proteins by recruiting them to cellular receptors that mediate delivery to the lysosome. Recent development of GalNAc-LYTACs and MoDE-As targeting the liver-specific ASGPR enables cell-type-restricted lysosomal protein degradation and reveals new LYTAC design principles.
The structure of a giant ubiquitin E3 ligase sheds light on its activation in a substrate-dependent manner and shows how a single E3 enzyme uses distinct recognition modules to confer substrate specificity.
Liquid–liquid phase separation, yielding membraneless organelles, allows for the sequestration and functional insulation of cellular proteins. A modularly built, synthetic membraneless organelle platform enables efficient control over endogenous cellular activities by knockdown of protein function or controlled protein release.
RNA knot-like structures function as an efficient physical barrier to RNA exoribonucleases. Single-molecule mechanical manipulation is used to unfold these structures and unravel the cause of their unusual mechanical resistance from a different direction.
A survey of natural metabolic pathways for C1 substrates (methane, methanol, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide) highlights past efforts and recent progress, and informs future opportunities to create synthetic C1-utilizing microbes.
Different ubiquitin chain types serve as distinct cellular signals. A new synthetic antigen-binding fragment, sAB-K29, specifically recognizes K29-linked diubiquitin and links K29 chains to proteotoxic stress and their accumulation in midbodies during mitosis.
Current antibody discovery technologies are limited in terms of their efficacy, accessibility, and scalability. The AHEAD system addresses these limitations by presenting an accelerated evolution workflow for antibody engineering that combines autonomous gene diversification with protein display technology.
This Review summarizes the recent technical advances in probing RNA secondary structures and discusses their connection with RNA regulatory functions in various biological processes and future directions in RNA structure-probing methods.
Over the past two decades, inhibitors of the polycomb repressor complex (PRC) have been driven from bench to bedside. New chemical compounds targeting the RING1B in polycomb repressor complex 1 (PRC1) add important tools to regulate polycomb functions.
Heme-containing proteins support a broad range of cellular functions. A new crystal structure explains how an integral-membrane heme lyase attaches the hydrophobic heme to soluble proteins.
Extracellular peptidoglycan-linked polysaccharide modifications mediate cell morphology, division, and autolysis in some Gram-positive bacterial pathogens. A new study shows that the degree and location of a specific modification controls peptidoglycan hydrolysis and placement of the axis of cell division.
Liquid–liquid phase separation can increase the rate of enzyme activity by concentrating reactants together. A phase-separating SUMOylation cascade offers conceptual and quantitative insight into the mechanisms underlying the activity enhancement.
Cell–cell interactions and resulting signaling events drive key biological processes. This Review discusses the deconvolution of this complex biology through the development of tools for visualizing, chemically tagging and functionally exploiting these interactions.
This Review summarizes recent progress in small-molecule probes used to address questions in cell division and appraises some emerging techniques that can be adapted to cell division studies.
Autophagy has been widely implicated in human health and disease. The most recent advances in developing small molecule probes for autophagy are presented, as well as the potential to use this process for targeted protein degradation.
