Insight on Research

The spliceosome is a molecular machine, which together with RNA polymerases and ribosomes plays a critical role in basic gene expression. Research by Kiyoshi Nagai’s group in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, has previously revealed the structure of the spliceosome in a fully active, substrate-bound state, immediately after its first catalytic reaction. The group has […]

Macropinocytosis, the cellular uptake of fluids from the environment, is employed by a variety of cells and requires the formation of a cup-shaped structure that protrudes from the cell’s surface and captures gulps of medium. Polymerisation of actin under the plasma membrane drives the extension of macropinocytic cups. However, until now it has been unclear […]

Ribosomes are cellular molecular machines that link amino acids together in the order specified by messenger RNA (mRNA) to make proteins. Near the end of the mRNA molecule a specific nucleotide sequence, known as a stop codon, signals for protein synthesis to terminate by recruiting release factors that release the newly made protein from the […]

The design and synthesis of genomes provides a powerful approach for understanding and engineering biology. The development of methods that can accurately replace the genome in sections, provide feedback on precisely where a given design fails and on how to repair it, and that can be rapidly repeated for whole genome replacement would accelerate our […]

The ubiquitin system is a complex system in all eukaryotic organisms involved in the regulation of most cellular processes. A huge variety of signals are assembled with ubiquitin molecules onto cellular proteins to mark them for a specific task. Important regulators of the ubiquitin system are deubiquitinating enzymes (DUBs), which remove, or cleave, ubiquitin chains […]

The Wnt signaling pathway is an ancient cell communication pathway that has important roles in development and cancer. For the first time, work by Mariann Bienz’s group in the LMB’s PNAC Division has uncovered the molecular mechanism triggering the assembly of the Wnt signalosome, a key component of the Wnt signal transduction pathway that controls […]