EDITORIAL article

Front. Mol. Biosci.

Sec. Structural Biology

Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmolb.2025.1625111

This article is part of the Research TopicMethodological Advancements and Improvements in Structural BiologyView all 7 articles

Methodological Advancements and Improvements in Structural Biology

Provisionally accepted
  • King's College London, London, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

can be used for different chemical, biological and medical applications.The authors discussed the repository and its merits and analysed the possible limitations and future updates.Finally, the paper by Kara et al. (6) discusses an easy and straightforward NMR-based method to study protein-RNA interactions and to evaluate the binding of pairs of proteins to a single-stranded RNA under physiological conditions. The authors showed that they can readily incorporate a 19 F atom on the ribose of nucleotides in any single strand RNA sequence. As a result, addition of an RNA binding protein to the RNA causes perturbation of the intensity of the 19 F NMR signal changes when the 19 F atom is located near the protein binding site. These studies can in principle be carried out in a nuclear extract that mimics the physiological environment in which these protein-ssRNA interactions occur. The authors demonstrated that a trifluoromethoxy group (-OCF3) incorporated in the 2' ribose position of single strand RNA sequences increases the sensitivity of the NMR signal.These technical advancements demonstrate how active structural biology still is in the machine learning era and provide useful guidelines to improve the standing techniques.

Keywords: Biophysics, X ray crystallography, cryo-EM, labelling for NMR studies, XFEL, Small-angle X-ray scattering

Received: 08 May 2025; Accepted: 04 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Pastore. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Annalisa Pastore, King's College London, London, United Kingdom

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.