The state of the immune system has effects on brain function, but despite suggestions that immunoregulators can affect people’s mood and behaviour, we are only beginning to understand how these two major body systems interact. The contributions of a neuron to circuit activity and behaviour depend on its responsiveness to upstream inputs, and its ability […]
Insight on Research
New insights into the structure and dynamics of the catalytic spliceosome
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 […]
New hypothesis for the formation of macropinocytic cups
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 […]
Recovering stalled ribosomes
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 […]
New technologies enable systematic recoding of genomes
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 […]
New insights into the mechanism of ubiquitin chain cleavage
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 […]