Autophagy, or "self-eating", is an essential cellular quality control mechanism that clears the cell of protein aggregates and damaged organelles. This mechanism is inactive under normal conditions and only triggered upon ...
Precise control of gene expression—ensuring that cells make the correct components in the right amount and at the right time—is vital for all organisms to function properly. Cells must regulate how genes encoded in the sequence ...
Heliozoan axopodia are important for their motility. However, the underlying mechanism of their axopodial contraction has remained ambiguous. Recently, researchers from the Okayama University reported that microtubules are ...
Eukaryotic cells—the ones that make up most life as we know it, including all animals, plants and fungi—are highly structured objects.
Life depends on the precise functioning of several proteins synthesized in cells by ribosomes. This diverse set of proteins, known as a proteome, is maintained by the robust translation elongation of amino acid sequences ...
Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have uncovered the function of the release factor mtRF1 in the final steps of mitochondrial protein synthesis. The study, published in Nature Communications, reveals new insights into ...
How did the complex organisms on Earth arise? This is one of the big open questions in biology. A collaboration between the working groups of Christa Schleper at the University of Vienna and Martin Pilhofer at ETH Zurich ...
Translation, a process that expresses the genetic information from messenger RNA (mRNA) to protein, is vital to maintain cellular protein homeostasis. To synthesize functional proteins and avoid toxic translation products, ...
Using the word predation may seem surprising when we talk about the first organisms that set out to eat other organisms, for they were not deadly predators with sharp teeth and claws, but small single-celled life forms that ...
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global health problem. Species of drug-resistant pathogens, including Neisseria gonorrhoeae, could become untreatable due to a high degree of AMR.
