Considerations and challenges in studying liquid-liquid phase separation and biomolecular condensates
By S. Alberti, A. Gladfelter, Tanja Mittag. Cell, 2019
2,383 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Evidence is now mounting that liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) underlies the formation of membraneless compartments in cells. This realization has motivated major efforts to delineate the function of such biomolecular condensates in normal cells and their roles in contexts ranging from development to age-related disease. There is great interest in understanding the underlying biophysical principles and the specific properties of biological condensates with the goal of bringing insights into a wide range of biological processes and systems. The explosion of physiological and pathological contexts involving LLPS requires clear standards for their study. Here, we propose guidelines for rigorous experimental characterization of LLPS processes in vitro and in cells, discuss the caveats of common experimental approaches, and point out experimental and theoretical gaps in the field.
Subfields: Molecular Biology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78b0505e7843d111c97183d01424426ae8b0ded1
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In Molecular Biology
Citations in the corpus
- A Unified Model for the Function of YTHDF Proteins in Regulating m6A-Modified mRNA (2020, background): “This phenomenon is seen in proteins, like the DF paralogs, that contain low-complexity domains (Alberti et al., 2019).”
- Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation in Disease. (2019, background): “Phase separation is a process by which a homogeneous liquid solution (or phase) of macromolecular components separates (or demixes) into two distinct phases, one phase that is enriched for the macromolecules and another phase that is depleted of the same macromolecules (4, 12, 75, 138).”