Structural biology articles from across Nature Portfolio

mTORC1 promotes cell growth by sensing nutrients and driving anabolic processes. When nutrients are scarce, GATOR1 turns off growth signals. Our study describes how KICSTOR links GATOR1 to lysosomes to enable its function, a finding that may help us to understand certain neurological disorders.

β-Barrel assembly machinery (BAM) structures from Bacteroidota reveal unexpected diversity in BAM architecture by identifying unique subunits that function at the cell surface.

Sample consumption is one of the major bottlenecks limiting protein structure elucidation in serial crystallography. This review provides a critical and comprehensive assessment of state-of-the-art sample delivery approaches, discusses their realization and applications and delineates advancements in the field to reduce sample consumption.

PI3Kα is a lipid kinase crucial for cell growth, with its membrane-bound active conformation remaining elusive. Here, the authors use Molecular Dynamics simulations to reveal how the H1047R mutation enhances the interactions of PI3Kα with the membrane, uncovering putative allosteric pockets that could inform novel therapeutic strategies targeting the protein-membrane interface.

The vastness of ultra-large make-on-demand compound libraries presents a challenge for efficient in-silico drug discovery. Here, the authors introduce RosettaEvolutionaryLigand (REvoLd), an evolutionary algorithm that significantly enhances hit rates in protein-ligand docking by efficiently navigating combinatorial chemical spaces spanning billions of compounds.

mTORC1 promotes cell growth by sensing nutrients and driving anabolic processes. When nutrients are scarce, GATOR1 turns off growth signals. Our study describes how KICSTOR links GATOR1 to lysosomes to enable its function, a finding that may help us to understand certain neurological disorders.

β-Barrel assembly machinery (BAM) structures from Bacteroidota reveal unexpected diversity in BAM architecture by identifying unique subunits that function at the cell surface.

The structural biology community in New York City combines expertise and access to cutting-edge instrumentation that fosters cooperation. Working collaboratively is indispensable because developing interdisciplinary tools can enable discoveries in cell, structural and molecular biology.

The developers of OpenFold3 have released an early version of the tool, which they hope will one day perform on par with DeepMind’s protein-structure model.

Bacteria insert proteins into their outer membrane using a highly conserved apparatus known as the β-barrel assembly machinery (BAM). A large group of bacteria with particularly complex outer-membrane proteins is now shown to have a BAM apparatus with a highly unusual composition.