Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics

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A revolution in chemical biology occurred with the introduction of click chemistry. Click chemistry plays an important role in protein chemistry modifications, providing specific, sensitive, rapid, and easy-to-handle methods. Under physiological conditions, click chemistry often overlaps with bioorthogonal chemistry, defined as reactions that occur rapidly and selectively without interfering with biological processes. Click chemistry is used for the posttranslational modification of proteins based on covalent bond formations...

Solving the mechanism of a chemical reaction requires determining the structures of all the ground states on the pathway and the elusive transition states linking them. 2024 is the centenary of Brønsted's landmark paper that introduced the β -value and structure-activity studies as the only experimental means to infer the structures of transition states. It involves making systematic small changes in the covalent structure of the reactants and analysing changes in activation and equilibrium-free energies...

Zoonoses are infectious agents that are transmissible between animals and humans. Up to 60% of known infectious diseases and 75% of emergent diseases are zoonotic. Genomic variation between homeostatic populations provides a novel window into the effect of environmental pathogens on allelic distributions within the populations. Genodynamics is a biophysical approach utilizing developed metrics on biallelic single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that can be used to quantify the adaptive influences due to pathogens...

Optogenetics, the use of microbial rhodopsins to make the electrical activity of targeted neurons controllable by light, has swept through neuroscience, enabling thousands of scientists to study how specific neuron types contribute to behaviors and pathologies, and how they might serve as novel therapeutic targets. By activating a set of neurons, one can probe what functions they can initiate or sustain, and by silencing a set of neurons, one can probe the functions they are necessary for. We here review the biophysics of these molecules, asking why they became so useful in neuroscience for the study of brain circuitry...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Nanofluidic structures have over the last two decades emerged as a powerful platform for detailed analysis of DNA on the kilobase pair length scale. When DNA is confined to a nanochannel, the combination of excluded volume and DNA stiffness leads to the DNA being stretched to near its full contour length. Importantly, this stretching takes place at equilibrium, without any chemical modifications to the DNA. As a result, any DNA can be analyzed, such as DNA extracted from cells or circular DNA, and it is straight-forward to study reactions on the ends of linear DNA...

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Biomolecular interactions are at the base of all physical processes within living organisms; the study of these interactions has led to the development of a plethora of different methods. Among these, single-molecule ( in singulo ) experiments have become relevant in recent years because these studies can give insight into mechanisms and interactions that are hidden for ensemble-based ( in multiplo ) methods. The focus of this review is on optical tweezer (OT) experiments, which can be used to apply and measure mechanical forces in molecular systems...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.