Mystery solved about the machines that move your genes

Fleets of microscopic machines toil away in your cells, carrying out critical biological tasks and keeping you alive. By combining theory and experiment, researchers have discovered the surprising way one of these machines, ...

Molecular scissors stabilize the cell's cytoskeleton

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI in Villigen, Switzerland, have for the first time elucidated the structure of important enzymes in human cells that alter essential building blocks of the cellular cytoskeleton. ...

DNA origami to scale-up molecular motors

Researchers have successfully used DNA origami to make smooth-muscle-like contractions in large networks of molecular motor systems, a discovery which could be applied in molecular robotics.

How our cellular antennas are formed

Most of our cells contain an immobile primary cilium, an antenna used to transfer information from the surrounding environment. Some cells also have many mobile cilia that are used to generate movement. The 'skeleton' of ...

Visualizing 'unfurling' microtubule growth

Living cells depend absolutely on tubulin, a protein that forms hollow tube-like polymers, called microtubules, that form scaffolding for moving materials inside the cell. Tubulin-based microtubule scaffolding allows cells ...

Keeping our cells stable: A closer look at microtubules

Microtubules help to regulate cell structure. A group of Japanese researchers have used cryo-electron microscopy to shed light on how a certain protein keeps microtubules stable and regulates microtubule-based transport within ...

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