Journal Articles

Kinetic mechanism of lever arm movement in myosin [Biochemistry]

Myosins use a conserved structural mechanism to convert the energy from ATP hydrolysis into a large swing of the force-generating lever arm. The precise timing of the lever arm movement with respect to the steps in the actomyosin ATPase cycle has not been determined. We have developed a FRET system...
Categories: Journal Articles

Directed evolution of tryptophan synthase [Biochemistry]

Enzymes in heteromeric, allosterically regulated complexes catalyze a rich array of chemical reactions. Separating the subunits of such complexes, however, often severely attenuates their catalytic activities, because they can no longer be activated by their protein partners. We used directed evolution to explore allosteric regulation as a source of latent...
Categories: Journal Articles

Designing proteins with extreme kinetic stability [Biophysics and Computational Biology]

The design of stable, functional proteins is difficult. Improved design requires a deeper knowledge of the molecular basis for design outcomes and properties. We previously used a bioinformatics and energy function method to design a symmetric superfold protein composed of repeating structural elements with multivalent carbohydrate-binding function, called ThreeFoil. This...
Categories: Journal Articles

Structure of CAP-Gly on microtubules by MAS NMR [Biophysics and Computational Biology]

Microtubules and their associated proteins perform a broad array of essential physiological functions, including mitosis, polarization and differentiation, cell migration, and vesicle and organelle transport. As such, they have been extensively studied at multiple levels of resolution (e.g., from structural biology to cell biology). Despite these efforts, there remain significant...
Categories: Journal Articles

Dynamic allostery in CypA-HIV capsid interplay [Biophysics and Computational Biology]

Host factor protein Cyclophilin A (CypA) regulates HIV-1 viral infectivity through direct interactions with the viral capsid, by an unknown mechanism. CypA can either promote or inhibit viral infection, depending on host cell type and HIV-1 capsid (CA) protein sequence. We have examined the role of conformational dynamics on the...
Categories: Journal Articles

Modulation of shedding by O-glycosylation [Cell Biology]

Regulated shedding of the ectodomain of cell membrane proteins by proteases is a common process that releases the extracellular domain from the cell and activates cell signaling. Ectodomain shedding occurs in the immediate extracellular juxtamembrane region, which is also where O-glycosylation is often found and examples of crosstalk between shedding...
Categories: Journal Articles

Human round spermatid injection [Developmental Biology]

During the human in vitro fertilization procedure in the assisted reproductive technology, intracytoplasmic sperm injection is routinely used to inject a spermatozoon or a less mature elongating spermatid into the oocyte. In some infertile men, round spermatids (haploid male germ cells that have completed meiosis) are the most mature cells...
Categories: Journal Articles

Epigenetic landscape of meiotic chromosomes [Developmental Biology]

During meiosis, homologous chromosomes associate to form the synaptonemal complex (SC), a structure essential for fertility. Information about the epigenetic features of chromatin within this structure at the level of superresolution microscopy is largely lacking. We combined single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) with quantitative analytical methods to describe the epigenetic landscape...
Categories: Journal Articles

Retrotransposon silencing in mouse embryos [Developmental Biology]

Substantial proportions of mammalian genomes comprise repetitive elements including endogenous retrotransposons. Although these play diverse roles during development, their appropriate silencing is critically important in maintaining genomic integrity in the host cells. The major mechanism for retrotransposon silencing is DNA methylation, but the wave of global DNA demethylation that occurs...
Categories: Journal Articles

Potentially biogenic 4.1 billion-year-old carbon [Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences]

Evidence of life on Earth is manifestly preserved in the rock record. However, the microfossil record only extends to ∼3.5 billion years (Ga), the chemofossil record arguably to ∼3.8 Ga, and the rock record to 4.0 Ga. Detrital zircons from Jack Hills, Western Australia range in age up to nearly...
Categories: Journal Articles

Response of desert wetlands to climate change [Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences]

Desert wetlands are keystone ecosystems in arid environments and are preserved in the geologic record as groundwater discharge (GWD) deposits. GWD deposits are inherently discontinuous and stratigraphically complex, which has limited our understanding of how desert wetlands responded to past episodes of rapid climate change. Previous studies have shown that...
Categories: Journal Articles

Retrading, production and asset market performance [Economic Sciences]

Prior studies have shown that traders quickly converge to the price–quantity equilibrium in markets for goods that are immediately consumed, but they produce speculative price bubbles in resalable asset markets. We present a stock-flow model of durable assets in which the existing stock of assets is subject to depreciation and...
Categories: Journal Articles

Ultrasensitive gas detection of B-doped graphene [Engineering]

Heteroatom doping is an efficient way to modify the chemical and electronic properties of graphene. In particular, boron doping is expected to induce a p-type (boron)-conducting behavior to pristine (nondoped) graphene, which could lead to diverse applications. However, the experimental progress on atomic scale visualization and sensing properties of large-area...
Categories: Journal Articles

Ultraflexible temperature sensors [Engineering]

We report a fabrication method for flexible and printable thermal sensors based on composites of semicrystalline acrylate polymers and graphite with a high sensitivity of 20 mK and a high-speed response time of less than 100 ms. These devices exhibit large resistance changes near body temperature under physiological conditions with...
Categories: Journal Articles

Directional transport in retronasal olfaction [Engineering]

The ability of humans to distinguish the delicate differences in food flavors depends mostly on retronasal smell, in which food volatiles entrained into the airway at the back of the oral cavity are transported by exhaled air through the nasal cavity to stimulate the olfactory receptor neurons. Little is known...
Categories: Journal Articles

Soil water redistribution by a saprotrophic fungus [Environmental Sciences]

The desiccation of upper soil horizons is a common phenomenon, leading to a decrease in soil microbial activity and mineralization. Recent studies have shown that fungal communities and fungal-based food webs are less sensitive and better adapted to soil desiccation than bacterial-based food webs. One reason for a better fungal...
Categories: Journal Articles

Ferritin in diel recycling of iron [Environmental Sciences]

In large regions of the open ocean, iron is a limiting resource for phytoplankton. The reduction of iron quota and the recycling of internal iron pools are among the diverse strategies that phytoplankton have evolved to allow them to grow under chronically low ambient iron levels. Phytoplankton species also have...
Categories: Journal Articles

GWAS of HIV-1 control [Genetics]

Previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of HIV-1–infected populations have been underpowered to detect common variants with moderate impact on disease outcome and have not assessed the phenotypic variance explained by genome-wide additive effects. By combining the majority of available genome-wide genotyping data in HIV-infected populations, we tested for association between...
Categories: Journal Articles

NIK controls cross-presentation by dendritic cells [Immunology and Inflammation]

Dendritic cells (DCs) link innate and adaptive immunity and use a host of innate immune and inflammatory receptors to respond to pathogens and inflammatory stimuli. Although DC maturation via canonical NF-κB signaling is critical for many of these functions, the role of noncanonical NF-κB signaling via the serine/threonine kinase NIK...
Categories: Journal Articles

Prenatal diagnosis of subchromosomal abnormalities [Medical Sciences]

Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) using sequencing of fetal cell-free DNA from maternal plasma has enabled accurate prenatal diagnosis of aneuploidy and become increasingly accepted in clinical practice. We investigated whether NIPT using semiconductor sequencing platform (SSP) could reliably detect subchromosomal deletions/duplications in women carrying high-risk fetuses. We first showed that...
Categories: Journal Articles
Syndicate content