Showing papers in "Biophysical Journal in 2016"

TL;DR: This study demonstrates that efficient chromosome compaction can be achieved solely by an active loop-extrusion process, and finds that human chromosomes operate at the border of the dense steady state.

TL;DR: This report provides the first, to the authors' knowledge, direct evidence that nesprin-2G, and by extension the LINC complex, is subject to mechanical force.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that polyunsaturated fats affect the composition and organization of biological membranes, suggesting a potential mechanism for the extensive effects of dietary fat on health and disease.

TL;DR: The development of a cryo-stage allowing for spinning-disk confocal light microscopy at cryogenic temperatures is presented and the incorporation of the new hardware into existing workflows for cellular sample preparation bycryo-FIB is described.

TL;DR: Together, theory and experiment provide evidence suggesting that collective cellular motion is driven by at least two internal variables that serve to sustain waves and to polarize local cellular traction in a direction that deviates systematically from local cellular velocity.

TL;DR: This review focuses on the initial step in Cu homeostasis, the properties of the major protein, hCTR1, that mediates Cu uptake, and the status of the understanding of this highly specialized transport system.

TL;DR: This study rigorously characterized the plasticity in materials commonly used for cell culture and revealed time-dependent plasticity, or viscoplasticity, in collagen gels, reconstituted basement membrane matrix, agaroseGels, alginate Gels, and fibrin gles, but not in polyacrylamide gels.

TL;DR: It is shown that oncogenic mutant K-Ras interacts with a negatively charged lipid bilayer membrane in multiple orientations, and it is proposed that the different modes of membrane binding may be exploited in structure-based drug design efforts for cancer therapy.

TL;DR: It is found that cell mechanics values in mitosis are captured by a simple rheological model characterized by a single timescale on the order of 10 s, which marks the onset of fluidity in the system.

TL;DR: In this paper, the relative contributions of both freely mobile fluid and gel fluid to interstitial fluid pressure were investigated by performing simultaneous, real-time fluid-pressure measurements with both the classical wick-in-needle method (to estimate free-fluid pressure) and a piezoelectric pressure catheter transducer (which is capable of capturing pressures associated with either phase).

TL;DR: A universal chemomechanical model is developed that describes nuclear strains and shapes and predicts thresholds for the rupture of the nuclear envelope and for nuclear plastic deformation during transmigration through small constrictions and faithfully reproduced the experimentally observed irreversible nuclear deformations after transmigration in lamin-A/C-deficient cells.

TL;DR: Studying structure can reveal how molecules have evolved, and this type of insight would otherwise be lost by looking at only the molecule’s sequence.

TL;DR: It was found that a collapsed conformation of the polymer is required to ensure efficient insertion into the lipid membrane and that efficient solubilization may be improved by a more homogenous distribution of the maleic acid monomer units along the polymer chain.

TL;DR: The key points of organellar Ca(2+) imaging are discussed and some of the recent advances in the engineering of fluorescent GECIs targeted to specific organelles are highlighted.

TL;DR: A novel method for using force spectroscopy approach curves with tipless cantilevers to determine the actomyosin cortical tension, elastic modulus, and intracellular pressure of nonadherent cells and shows that myosin II activity and actin polymerization increase cortex tension and intrACEllular pressure, whereas branched actin networks decreased them.

TL;DR: It was found that fibrinogen glycation had no significant systematic effect on single-fiber modulus, extensibility, or stress relaxation times, and the fiber modulus strongly decreases with increasing fiber diameter, which implies that it is easier to dissolve clots that consist of fewer thick fibers than those that consists of many thin fibers, which is consistent with experimental and clinical observations.

TL;DR: It is discovered that adding fluorescent proteins to the C-terminus resulted in constitutive anion channel activity and the stoichiometry of LRRC8 heteromers is variable, with a number of subunits ≥6, and that the heteromer composition depends on the relative expression of different subunits.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that the physical properties of M reB filaments are important for shape control and support a model in which MreB organizes the cell wall growth machinery to produce a chiral cell wall structure and dictate cell diameter.

TL;DR: A consensus kinesin-1 chemomechanical is presented that incorporates recent work, resolves discrepancies, and highlights key questions for future experimental work, hoped that this model provides a framework for understanding how diverse kinesins are tuned for their specific cellular roles.

TL;DR: A tracking microscope was rebuilt so that it could visualize flagellar filaments of tracked cells by fluorescence and there were events in which filaments underwent polymorphic transformations but remained in bundles, leading to small deflections in direction of travel.

TL;DR: A biochemical model of the wall shear stress-induced activation of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) in an endothelial cell is presented and predicts a highly nonlinear, biphasic transient behavior of eNOS activation and NO production.

TL;DR: Homogeneous lipid bilayers of 21 distinct lipid A types from 12 bacterial species are modeled and simulated to investigate the differences and similarities of their membrane properties and a good correlation is observed among the area per lipid, hydrophobic thickness, and acyl chain order.

TL;DR: The central dogma of molecular biology states that genetic information encoded in the DNA sequence is transcribed into messenger RNA and then translated into a sequence of amino acids, which folds into a protein.

TL;DR: Every so often news about a viral outbreak goes viral and catches widespread public attention in the media but fades from view leaving the public with a new health concern to worry about but little knowledge of the actual factors involved in the problem.

TL;DR: Atomistic molecular-dynamics simulations provide critical atomistic insight into the aggregation pathway of Aβ42 and a putative toxic mechanism in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease.

TL;DR: This method provides an accurate and robust means for measuring physical parameters of the actomyosin cortical layer in vivo directly from laser ablation experiments and provides insights into the active mechanics processes that govern tissue-scale morphogenesis.

TL;DR: It is shown that if anionic POPC/POPS vesicles are used as model membranes, cholesterol has a negligible effect on the kinetics of IAPP fibril growth on the surface of the bilayer, while if 1:2 DOPC/DPPC raft-like model membranes are used, cholesterol accelerates fiber growth and leads to leakage.

TL;DR: This work uses single-molecule fluorescence microscopy and three-dimensional quantitative analyses in live Escherichia coli to demonstrate that its cytoplasmic membrane contains microdomains with distinct physical properties that depend on the integrity of the MreB cytoskeleton network underneath the membrane.

TL;DR: Some of the potentially most relevant avenues and accomplishments of membrane-anchored DNA nanostructures for investigating, engineering, and mimicking lipid membrane-related biophysical processes are presented.

TL;DR: An in-depth time-resolved optical and electron-paramagnetic resonance spectroscopic study of two cryptochromes from Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and Drosophila melanogaster reveals the existence of a fourth, more distant aromatic amino acid that serves as a terminal electron donor in both proteins, and shows that a tyrosine is able to fulfill this very role in Chlamedonian cryptochrome.