Review: Integrating cellular electron microscopy with multimodal data to explore biology across space and time
Plant Science Research WeeklyFifty years ago (1974), Albert Claude, Christian de Duve, and George Palade were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discoveries on the structural and functional organization of the cell, which Claude eloquently framed by writing, “We have entered the cell, the mansion of our birth, and started the inventory…
Using cryo-EM to solve the structures of proteins involved in starch degradation
Plant Science Research WeeklyStarch is synthesized in the chloroplasts of leaves during the day and degraded at night. BAM1 (β-AMYLASE 1) catalyzes starch degradation and interacts with the non-catalytic glucan phosphatase called LSF1 (LIKE SEX FOUR 1) and the plastid localised MDH (MALATE DEHYDROGENASE). However, we don’t fully…
Bacterial pathogens deliver water- and solute-permeable channels to plant cells
Plant Science Research WeeklyWhat do you do when you’ve identified a gene that you know is important, but you don’t know how it functions? Usually, you can get hints from homology searches, overexpression studies, or the identification of protein domains, but sometimes those approaches don’t work. That’s where the story…
PeTriBERT : Augmenting BERT with tridimensional encoding for inverse protein folding and design (bioRxiv)
Plant Science Research WeeklyThe AlphaFoldDB database recently made headlines by predicting the three-dimensional protein structure of millions of proteins based on their primary amino acid sequence. Most of these models remain to be tested, but it’s a place to start. Here, Dumortier et al. add an important complementary tool…