WORCESTER, Mass.—Making a movie at the molecular level? A new method of imaging molecule-sized machines as they do the complex work of cutting and pasting genetic information inside the nucleus is the ...

Many cases of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) are associated with the C9ORF72 gene, which is known to encode toxic molecules, dipeptide repeat proteins, that ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 119, No. 48 (November 29, 2022), pp. 1-12 (12 pages) Spliceosome activation is the process of creating the ...

Removal of introns from the precursors to messenger RNA (premRNAs) requires close apposition of intron ends by the spliceosome, but when and how apposition occurs is unclear. We investigated the ...

Like a film director cutting out extraneous footage to create a blockbuster, the cellular machine called the spliceosome snips out unwanted stretches of genetic material and joins the remaining pieces ...

New work suggests that Prp8, a highly conserved protein in the heart of the spliceosome, both orients the substrate and participates in catalysis. The U5 snRNP functions in spliceosome assembly as a ...

The most frequent genetic cause of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD)--rare and related neurological disorders marked by progressive deterioration of motor or ...

In the first step of spliceosome assembly, an snRNA molecule known as U1 snRNA binds to the 5' splice site at the beginning of the intron. Until now, it had been thought that the binding strength ...

A new imaging technique can be used to understand the workings of complex biomolecular processes at a more detailed level than previously possible. The technique marks biomolecules with organic dyes ...

In multicellular organisms, the earliest products of transcription, called pre-mRNAs, undergo a molecular makeover before shipping out to the cytoplasm, where the modified mRNAs spell out the recipe ...

Humans share a comparable number of protein-coding genes with the simple roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, yet we are arguably more sophisticated organisms. This difference in complexity is thanks to ...