RNA binding proteins have emerged as central players in the mechanisms of many neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, a proteinopathy of fused in sarcoma (FUS) is present in some instances of...

Nature - A rapid cellular response to thermal and osmotic shocks.

Nature Biotechnology - A series of bright fluorescent RNAs with a broad emission spectra enable live cell imaging of RNA dynamics.

Nature Chemistry - Protein–RNA interactions regulate RNA fate and function, and are generally non-covalent and reversible. Genetically introducing a latent bioreactive amino acid into a...

Nature - A rapid cellular response to thermal and osmotic shocks.

Nature Communications - Mitochondrial quality control is critical for cellular homeostasis and survival. Here, the authors identify that defective mitochondria can be eliminated via secretion in...

Nature Chemical Biology - Dumelie et al. asked whether biomolecular phase-separated condensates can establish microenvironments with distinct metabolomes and found that amphipathic lipids are...

ER-targeted proteins have evolved to avoid aggregation by flanking their aggregation-prone regions with N-glycans.

Nature - The in-tissue architectures of β-amyloid and tau pathology in a postmortem Alzheimer’s disease donor brain are determined, showing fibril heterogeneity is spatially organized by...

Nature - Nuclear speckles are shown to have a functional role in mRNA splicing, whereby dynamic three-dimensional organization of DNA around these structures mediates splicing efficiency.

Nature - RibosomeST—a ribosome with a specialized nascent polypeptide exit tunnel—cotranslationally regulates the folding of a subset of male germ-cell-specific proteins that are...

Nature Chemistry - Cells spatially organize biochemical reactions within membrane-bound and membraneless compartments. The extent to which intrinsically disordered proteins themselves can form...

Nature Communications - Studying RNA decay remains a challenging task. Here, the authors present a technology that enables inducible rapid degradation of targeted mRNAs. Visualizing mRNA decay...

Nature Chemistry - Phase separation is being revealed as important in many biological processes. Most attempts to mimic and deconstruct this use engineered natural proteins. Now it is shown that de...

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) of proteins contribute to various cellular functions, including signal transduction, gene regulation, and subcellular organization (1). One of the most...

Harbauer et al. describe mitochondrial hitchhiking of the Pink1 mRNA on mitochondria in neurons. This coupling of the transcript of a short-lived mitochondrial protein to the movement of its target...

Eastwood et al. describe a system for export of recombinant proteins in membrane-bound vesicles from E. coli. A simple peptide tag allows high-yield production of functional proteins within vesicle...

Nature Chemical Biology - Protein misfolding can spread from one molecule to another in infectious prion diseases. The propagation of protein misfolding has been directly observed in single protein...

Protein targeting between destinations can be modulated post-translationally. Using NET1 as a model, Gasparski et al. show that, additionally, mRNA location in the cytoplasm and its translation...

Liquid-to-solid phase transition of oskar RNP granules ensures Drosophila embryonic development by regulating oskar mRNA localization and translation.

Eisenberg et al. identify translation initiation sites genome-wide in budding yeast. They define a class of 149 genes with alternate extended isoforms that initiate at non-AUG start codons. These...

Nature - Stress granules have a previously unknown role in organelle repair.

Nature Communications - Evidence suggests that fibrous aggregates of protein tau may be the proximal cause of Alzheimer’s disease. Here, using atomic structures of tau fibrils from brains of...

Nature Chemical Biology - CAG triple-nucleotide repeats in multiple genes have been linked to various human diseases. A recent study unveils the effects of CAG repeat RNA gelation on protein...

Nature Chemical Biology - Condensates have been proposed to create a distinct chemical solvating environment. In vitro condensate screens suggest that condensate chemical environments influence the...

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology - Oncoprotein transcription factor MYC undergoes phase separation, forming transcriptionally active condensates. The chemogenetic tool SPARK-ON reveals...

Nature Communications - Liquid–liquid phase separation is known in cell biology as an underlying mechanism of intracellular organization. The authors study a complex interplay between phase...

Genomic DNA that resides in the nuclei of mammalian neurons can be as old as the organism itself. The life span of nuclear RNAs, which are critical for proper chromatin architecture and transcription...

Although stress granules (SGs) form as a protective response to stress, their dysregulation contributes to various neurodegenerative diseases. Cui et al. review their dual roles in diseases as both...

RNA labeled in young mice is detected 2 years later in adult mouse brains

Sheehan and Nadarajah et al. identified that Bmal1 loss from astrocytes induces the expression of BAG3, a macroautophagy chaperone enriched in Alzheimer’s disease patients and in disease-associated...

Structural biology, as powerful as it is, can be misleading. We highlight four fundamental challenges: interpreting raw experimental data; accounting for motion; addressing the misleading nature of...

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology - Here, using cryo-EM, authors reveal that amyloid-β and tau are identical in Alzheimer disease and Down syndrome. This has implications for assessing...

Nature Aging - APOE4 is produced by neurons under stress, but the role of neuronal APOE4 in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis is still unclear. Here the authors report that selective removal...

UV cross-linking and mass spectrometry provide structural insights into protein-RNA interactions within biomolecular condensates.

Nature - Antisense RNAs boost gene expression by accelerating the export of mRNA from the nucleus to the cytoplasm through the Dbp2-mediated formation of double-stranded RNAs, which might explain...

Proteins containing blocks of charged amino acids in intrinsically disordered regions contribute to the layered organization of nucleoli and establish distinct pH environments in nuclear condensates.

Zhao et al. investigated the interactions between polyQ aggregates and the autophagy machinery in a native cellular environment using correlative cryo-electron tomography. While the fibrillar...

Nature - Two highly charged disordered human proteins phase-separate into viscous complex coacervates while retaining their rapid conformational dynamics through pico- to nanosecond exchange of...

In more than 30 years, Lee has made major discoveries about nearly every disease that is marked by abnormal, “misfolded” proteins in the brain. In 2006, for example, she showed that two of these...

Sirozh et al. reveal that nucleolar stress induced by arginine-rich peptides leads to a generalized accumulation of orphan ribosomal proteins, which is toxic in cells and drives accelerated aging in...

Nature Medicine - Microglia mediate the early and selective degeneration of corticostriatal synapses and the development of cognitive deficits in presymptomatic Huntington’s disease via the...

Nature Cell Biology - Chen et al. perform single-molecule imaging of translation at ribonucleoprotein (RNP) granules. They show that RNP granule surfaces are sites of nanos mRNA translation,...

A growing list of proteins has been found to moonlight as chaperones. Boeynaems et al. show that poly(A)-binding proteins bind a short linear motif in the stress granule and disease protein ataxin-2,...

Nature - RNA-dependent DEAD-box ATPases (DDXs) regulate the dynamics of phase-separated organelles, with ATP-bound DDXs promoting phase separation, and ATP hydrolysis inducing compartment...

Xu and Wang developed a reporter to visualize unfolded protein accumulation in the ER lumen in living cells. Upon unfolded protein binding, this reporter forms fluorescence puncta fast and reversib...

Paget et al. report that stress granules, condensates that form on cellular stresses, are involved in antiviral innate immunity. Stress granules prevent excessive innate immune activation to protect...

Alam et al. show that αS produced by the neurons of the gastrointestinal system is critical for the manifestation of peritoneal inflammation and systemic antigen-specific immune responses, which may...

Advances in artificial intelligence are revolutionizing protein engineering and design. This Perspective discusses the concepts and approaches of de novo protein design, emerging challenges in...

Insoluble tau aggregates are present in multiple neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease. In this article, Lester et al. show that tau aggregates are enriched for snRNAs and...

Nature Chemical Biology - NMR and Raman spectroscopies pinpoint the role of the protein droplet surface and RNA in the liquid droplet maturation mechanism of the FUS protein. A crust-like...

Bicknell et al. demonstrate that exogenously delivered mRNAs are degraded in a translation-dependent manner at a rate that correlates with ribosome load. ORF sequences leading to high ribosome load...

npj Parkinson's Disease - Parkinson’s disease: proteinopathy or lipidopathy?

Mouse oocytes store protein aggregates in liquid-like compartments that we named endolysosomal vesicular assemblies (ELVAs) in which the aggregates are degraded upon oocyte maturation. Failure to...

Nature Cell Biology - How spatial organization in the cell is achieved on the organelle scale is unclear. A new study finds that tethering specific proteins near the surface of micelle-like...

Nature Communications - Here, the authors measure the mRNA levels of thousands of coding sequence motifs in human cells to find that nascent peptides with a combination of β-strand structures...

mTORC1 signaling controls phase transitions in the cytoplasm through its effects on molecular crowding.

Communications Biology - Specially folded G-quadruplex of short RNAs have the capacity to form solid-like aggregates. The aggregation of these short RNAs is clearly observable both in cells and in...

Nature Chemical Biology - This Perspective discussed selective partitioning behaviors of biomolecules and small molecules and proposed that understanding the chemical properties that control their...

Nature Genetics - Genetic fine-mapping and CRISPRi screens identify functional variants and their target genes associated with Alzheimer’s disease in microglia. The variant rs7922621...

Nature Chemistry - Key molecular features that drive protein liquid–liquid phase separation (LLPS) for biomolecular condensate have been reported. A spectrum of additional interactions that...

Lerra, Panatta, et al. showed that BAZ2A forms an active subnuclear compartment that protects repressive H3K27me3 chromatin using phase-separation mechanisms. BAZ2A bodies are mediated by RNAs with...

Nature Communications - Biomolecular condensates play important roles in diverse cellular activities. Here the authors employ optogenetic tool and single-molecule mRNA imaging, showing that...

CluMPS (clusters magnified by phase separation) is a fluorescent reporter that detects small protein clusters in living cells. The combined multivalency of CluMPS and a multimerized target produces...

Viney et al. find that pathological human Tau proteins in a mouse model spread from affected pyramidal neurons to the oligodendrocytes insulating their axons. Over the lifespan, human Tau causes...

Nature - Phase separation of UTX protein enables it to suppress tumours.

Nature Communications - Mitophagy activation is mediated by mitochondrial depolarization. Here, the authors show that mitochondrial protein misfolding can activate mitophagy in a...

Nature - We report the cryo-electron microscopy structure of native pre-60S particles trapped in the channel of the yeast nuclear pore complex, suggesting a translocation model for the export of...

Liquid–liquid phase separation (LLPS) of heterogeneous ribonucleoproteins (hnRNPs) drives the formation of membraneless organelles, but structural information about their assembled states is still...

Nature Communications - TDP43 aggregates are a hallmark of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. By using deep mutagenesis to measure the toxicity of more than 50,000 mutations in the prion domain of...

Nature - The mechanisms by which mitochondria are transferred between cells and how intercellular mitochondria transfer regulates physiological processes and disease pathogenesis are discussed.

The conformational behaviour of an intrinsically disordered protein responsible for protecting tardigrades against extreme stress has been characterized. The protein assembles into fibres and...