



Wouldn't it be neat if, instead of the Table of Contents, you got a playlist of tunes inspired by or inspiring the science in the journal issue? Well, if you've ever asked yourself this question, I am happy to say you're about to get an answer. And if you haven't, I hope you are intrigued enough to read on, because I am about to unveil Structure's July issue soundtrack.

The selection of tunes was entirely guided by the topic of each paper, and I'll explain how as we go along. For some articles the link to the tune is obvious, but in some cases one needs to dig deeper. Regardless of the path I've taken, I hope you agree that this soundtrack is one fun, energy-filled listening collection, and just what you need to get you grooving this summer.

So, without further ado, I give you Side A of our soundtrack for July.

1) "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash

The title of the song poses a question that a marginally stable protein, such as the human von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) tumor suppressor, asks its cellular environment all the time in order to determine whether it needs to get degraded or press on to execute its function. Brock et al. now focus on a mutant of VHL that has surprising enhanced stability, and show that the mutant is more stable because of its increased ability to hold on to its binding partners.

2) "Aquarius (Let the Sunshine In)" by The 5th Dimension

Sunlight drives numerous biological processes, and photoreceptors are proteins that convert light signal into a biological signal. How this happens is still an open question, and Yang et al. address it by looking at structures of bacterial photoreceptors, bacteriophytochromes. The authors see that the process of photoconversion requires some serious protein acrobatics.

3) "Step by Step" by New Kids on the Block

What sorts of changes happen when a protein binds a ligand? It turns out quite a lot, and the changes can be to either protein structure or protein dynamics or both. Regardless of what happens, Chapman et al. now point out that it all boils down to small steps—modest changes in torsion angle rotations, which are finely tuned and cumulatively can lead to large and long-range effects on protein conformation.

4) "How Will I Know" by Whitney Houston

One of the large questions in cell biology is this: How does protein know what to bind? Some proteins are very specialized and bind only one partner or one class of partners. Others are more like the chemokine binding protein from the poxvirus orf (ORFV CKBP), which binds to chemokines from multiple classes. Couñago et al. provide a structural view of how ORFV CKBP accomplishes this.

5) "Under Pressure" by Queen featuring David Bowie

High-density lipoprotein (HDL) particles are commonly referred to as "good cholesterol" because they can take damaging lipids, cholesterol, triglycerides and such out of artery walls and transport them elsewhere, preventing strokes and heart attacks. HDL formation depends on a transmembrane protein, ATP-binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1). Segrest et al. propose that ABCA1 drives HDL biogenesis by disrupting the membrane lipid bilayer and pressuring the extracellular lipid sheet monolayer into forming a discus-like pleat structure containing HDL ingredients, ready to deploy.

6) "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield

"Release your inhibitions" is a line in this catchy tune that aptly describes what happens to notch receptors when they bind the right ligand. In the absence of ligand binding, all notch receptors are held in an autoinhibited state. For Notch3 this state is not as stable as for other notch receptors, and Xu et al. explain why.

7) "Changes" by David Bowie

The structural work of Bisson et al. yields a clear picture of an enzyme, imidazoleglycerol-phosphate dehydratase (IGPD), which changes the way it binds the metal ion in its active site in order to control successive steps in catalysis.

8) "Break On Through (To the Other Side)" by The Doors

Nuclear membrane is a busy place, with a lot of cargo going in and out of the nucleus all the time. mRNAs are one important class of cargo molecules, and transporting mRNAs through nuclear poles is a real team effort and involves numerous proteins and protein complexes. One of them is TREX-2 complex, and Dimitrova et al. show how it works with other export factors to help mRNA break on through to the other side.

9) "Come Together" by The Beatles

PICK1 protein is a cellular organizer, using its different domains to reach and scaffold different membrane proteins and the membrane. Among other things, Karlsen et al. highlight how multiple molecules of PICK1 come together via their BAR domains to allow long-range and dynamic scaffolding to take place.

Stay tuned for more, as Side B will be revealed in my next post, on Thursday, July 30. If you have alternative musical suggestions, tweet us about it @CellCrossTalk and @Structure_CP with #Biologyin3D hashtag.

Image credit: by Banfield (own work) via Wikimedia Commons