Section edited by Jeffrey Skolnick and Nick Grishin
The Structural and Molecular Biology section welcomes articles investigating both the structure of biological macromolecules and the molecular basis of biological activity. Specific areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the structure and function of proteins, nucleic acids and macormolecules in addition to studies on all aspects of DNA and RNA function and processing in a cellular context.
Periosteum is a thin membrane covering bone surfaces and consists of two layers: outer fibrous layer and inner cambium layer. Simple appearance of periosteum has belied its own complexity as a composite struct...
The interaction between proteins is a fundamental event for cellular life that is generally mediated by specialized protein domains or modules. PDZ domains are the largest class of protein–protein interaction ...
Long-chain acyl-CoA synthetase-4 (ACSL4) is involved in fatty acid metabolism, and aberrant ACSL4 expression could be either tumorigenic or tumor-suppressive in different tumor types. However, the function and...
The Correction to this article has been published in Biology Direct 2023 18:68
A basic tenet of protein science is that all information about the spatial structure of proteins is present in their sequences. Nonetheless, many proteins fail to attain native structure upon experimental dena...
Rhododendron chrysanthum Pall., an endangered species with significant ornamental and medicinal value, is endemic to the Changbai Mountain of China and can also serve as a significant ...
Molecular phenomena driving pathological aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases are not completely understood yet. Peculiar is the case of Spinocerebellar Ataxia 3 (SCA3) where the conformational properties...
The set of forces and sequence of events that govern the transition from an unfolded polypeptide chain to a functional protein with correct spatial structure remain incompletely known, despite the importance o...
Cpf1 nucleases have recently been repurposed for site-specific genome modification. Two members of the Cpf1 family, the AsCpf1 from Acidaminococcus sp. and the LbCpf1 from Lachnospiraceae bacterium were shown to ...
Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) of proteins fulfill important regulatory roles in most organisms. However, the proteins of certain endosymbiont and intracellular pathogenic bacteria with extremely redu...
Viral capsid assembly involves the oligomerization of the capsid nucleoprotein (NP), which is an essential step in viral replication and may represent a potential antiviral target. An in vitro transcription-tr...
The family of D cyclins has a fundamental role in cell cycle progression, but its members (D1, D2, D3) are believed to have redundant functions. However, there is some evidence that contradicts the notion of m...
The C-terminal domain of α-COP, an essential subunit of the COPI coatomer complex, is composed of an all α-helical region and a small β-sheet domain. We show that this β-sheet domain is a Really Interesting Ne...
Microbial rhodopsins and G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs, which include animal rhodopsins) are two distinct (super) families of heptahelical (7TM) membrane proteins that share obvious structural similaritie...
The N-end rule pathway is a part of the ubiquitin–dependent proteolytic system wherein N-recognin proteins recognize the amino terminal degradation signals (N-degrons) of the substrate. The type 1 N-degron recogn...
All modern cells are bounded by cell membranes best described by the fluid mosaic model. This statement is so widely accepted by biologists that little attention is generally given to the theoretical importanc...
Pannexin1 is ubiquitously expressed in vertebrate tissues, but the role it plays in vascular tone regulation remains unclear. We found that Pannexin1 expression level is much higher in the endothelium relative...
LINE-1 (L1) retrotransposons are repetitive elements in mammalian genomes. They arecapable of synthesizing DNA on their own RNA templates by harnessing reversetranscriptase (RT) that they encode. Abundantly ex...
Citation Impact 2023
Journal Impact Factor: 5.7
5-year Journal Impact Factor: 4.5
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): 1.060
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): 1.161
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