The peptidoglycan (PG) sacculus provides bacteria with the mechanical strength to maintain cell shape and resist osmotic stress. Enlargement of the mesh-like sacculus requires the combined activity of peptidoglycan synthases and hydrolases. In Escherichia ...
DNA-protein interactions lie at the crux of life's essential processes. As such, various technologies have been developed to characterize these interactions. The distinct advantages of these technologies can be leveraged to study different facets of these ...
Oxidative DNA lesions, constantly generated by both endogenous and environmentally induced reactive oxygen species, are removed via the base excision repair pathway. In bacteria, Fpg and Nei DNA glycosylases, belonging to the helix-two-turn-helix (H2TH) st ...
Transient associations between numerous organelles-e.g., the endoplasmic reticulum and the mitochondria-forge highly-coordinated, particular environments essential for cross-compartment information flow. Our perspective summarizes chemical-biology tools th ...
The nucleoprotein filament (NPF) is the fundamental element of homologous recombination (HR), a major mechanism for the repair of double-strand DNA breaks in the cell. The NPF is made of the damaged DNA strand surrounded by recombinase proteins, and its se ...
The Ppz enzymes are Ser/Thr protein phosphatases present only in fungi that are characterized by a highly conserved C-terminal catalytic region, related to PP1c phosphatases, and a more divergent N-terminal extension. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Ppz phosp ...
An in-depth understanding of the growth mechanism of nanocrystals (NCs) is of great significance for shape control of colloidal semiconductor nanostructures. In this study, we elucidate the formation mechanism of anisotropic CdSe NCs by systematically inve ...
The fluorescent analogue 2-aminopurine (2AP) of the canonical nucleobase adenine (6-aminopurine) base-pairs with thymine (T) without disrupting the helical structure of DNA. It therefore finds frequent use in molecular biology for probing DNA and RNA struc ...
Designing compounds that bind to the acidic patch of the nucleosome core particle (NCP) is an emerging therapeutic approach that can inhibit the binding of key chromatin factors. Pretreatment of human ovarian carcinoma, A2780, cells with RAPTA-T, an antime ...
Rationalizing the structure and structure–property relations for complex materials such as polymers or biomolecules relies heavily on the identification of local atomic motifs, e.g., hydrogen bonds and secondary structure patterns, that are seen as buildin ...
