Molecular machinery in action

4 Molecular Machinery Regulating Exocytosis

Watching cellular machinery in action, one molecule at a time

Single-molecule manipulation and imaging techniques have become important elements of the biologist's toolkit to gain mechanistic insights into cellular processes. By removing ensemble averaging, single-molecule methods provide unique access to the dynamic behavior of biomolecules. Recently, the use of these approaches has expanded to the study of complex multiprotein systems and has enabled de...

Regulated Membrane Fusion: Molecular Mechanisms and Machinery

Background Regulated exocytosis at the neuronal synapse is a multistep process starting with synaptic vesicle tethering at the active zone followed by vesicle priming and culminating in fast calcium-triggered membrane merger. Distinct protein-protein interactions forming macromolecular assemblies control individual steps and sequentially bring the two membranes into close proximity creating a h...

Coiled-coil networking shapes cell molecular machinery

The highly abundant α-helical coiled-coil motif not only mediates crucial protein-protein interactions in the cell but is also an attractive scaffold in synthetic biology and material science and a potential target for disease intervention. Therefore a systematic understanding of the coiled-coil interactions (CCIs) at the organismal level would help unravel the full spectrum of the biological f...

The molecular machinery of Keilin's respiratory chain.

Keilin's classic paper of 1925 [Keilin (1925) Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. B 100, 129-151], achieved with simple, but elegant, techniques, describes the cytochrome components of the respiratory chain and their roles in intracellular respiration and oxygen consumption. Since that time, a tremendous amount of work has clarified the intricate details of the prosthetic groups, cofactors and proteins t...