Reproductive genome from the laboratory

The field of synthetic biology does not only observe and describe processes of life but also mimics them. A key characteristic of life is the ability for replication, which means the maintenance of a chemical system. Scientists ...

Blue light for RNA control

Messenger RNA molecules contain genetic information and thus control the synthesis of proteins in living cells. Biochemists at the University of Bayreuth and the University of Bonn have now discovered a way to regulate this ...

The ABC of ribosome recycling

Ribosomes, the essential machinery used for protein synthesis is recycled after each one round of translation. An enzyme called ABCE1 is responsible for this process and turns out to be remarkably plastic as LMU biophysicists ...

Researchers find hidden proteins in bacteria

Scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed a way to identify the beginning of every gene—known as a translation start site or a start codon—in bacterial cell DNA with a single experiment and, through ...

Sea slug study illuminates how mitochondria move

Your cells have an amazing ability—they can build their own energy factories, called mitochondria. Once built, mitochondria must move where needed in the cell. Defects in mitochondrial transport are a suspected cause of ...

A molecular hammock for cotranslational modification

Proteins do most of the real work in cells and are modified in accordance with functional requirements. An LMU team has now shown how proteins are chemically altered on the ribosome, even before they fold into the active ...

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