Selective binding of the phosphate-substituted molecular tweezer 1a to protein lysine residues was suggested to explain the inhibition of certain enzymes and the aberrant aggregation of amyloid petide Aβ42 or α-synuclein, which are assumed to be responsible for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, respectively. In this work we systematically investigated the binding of four water-soluble tweeze...

Protection of primary neurons and mouse brain from Alzheimer’s pathology by molecular tweezers Aida Attar, Cristian Ripoli, Elisa Riccardi, Panchanan Maiti, Domenica D. Li Puma, Tingyu Liu, Jane Hayes, Mychica R. Jones, Kristin Lichti-Kaiser, Fusheng Yang, Greg D. Gale, Chi-hong Tseng, Miao Tan, Cui-Wei Xie, Jeffrey L. Straudinger, Frank-Gerrit Klärner, Thomas Schrader, Sally A. Frautschy, Clau...

The geometry imposed by the coordination sphere around the metal, together with the choice of the "arms" can be advantageously used to build corannulene-based molecular tweezers, which show great affinities for C60 and C70, as revealed by NMR titration experiments, mass spectroscopy, DFT calculations and the single crystal X-ray structural analysis of the compound C60 ⊂1.

ATP-dependent proteases degrade proteins in the cytosol of cells. Two recent articles, by Aubin-Tam et al. (2011) and Maillard et al. (2011 [this issue]), use single-molecule optical tweezers to show directly that these molecular machines use the energy derived from ATP hydrolysis to mechanically unfold and translocate its substrates into the proteolytic chamber.

Muscle myosin II is an ATP-driven, actin-based molecular motor. Recent developments in optical tweezers technology have made it possible to study movement and force production on the single-molecule level and to find out how different myosin isoforms may have adapted to their specific physiological roles.

Pyrene-based molecular tweezers show sequence-specific binding to aromatic polyimides through sterically-controlled donor-acceptor pi-stacking and hydrogen bonding; (1)H NMR spectra of tweezer-complexes with polyimides having different sequence-restrictions show conclusively that the detection of long range sequence-information results from multiple tweezer-binding at adjacent imide residues.