Protein Phase Separation: A New Phase in Cell Biology

By S. Boeynaems, S. Alberti, Nicolas L. Fawzi, Tanja Mittag, M. Polymenidou, Frederic Rousseau, J. Schymkowitz, J. Shorter, B. Wolozin, L. Van Den Bosch and 2 more. Trends in Cell Biology, 2018

1,723 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cellular compartments and organelles organize biological matter. Most well-known organelles are separated by a membrane boundary from their surrounding milieu. There are also many so-called membraneless organelles and recent studies suggest that these organelles, which are supramolecular assemblies of proteins and RNA molecules, form via protein phase separation. Recent discoveries have shed light on the molecular properties, formation, regulation, and function of membraneless organelles. A combination of techniques from cell biology, biophysics, physical chemistry, structural biology, and bioinformatics are starting to help establish the molecular principles of an emerging field, thus paving the way for exciting discoveries, including novel therapeutic approaches for the treatment of age-related disorders.

Subfields: Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fcffe47d949d7e81ea6e41eb51eae74581e519e1

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In Molecular Biology

1. Jian‐Kang Zhu
2. Lizhong Xiong
3. Yiting Shi
4. Shuhua Yang
5. Yan Guo
6. Yongqing Yang
7. Feng Qin
8. Yanglin Ding

Citations in the corpus

• Plant abiotic stress response and nutrient use efficiency (2020, background): “roles in stress signaling, as has been realized recently for animal cells (Boeynaems et al., 2018).”
• PLIP 2021: expanding the scope of the protein–ligand interaction profiler to DNA and RNA (2021, background): “It can undergo liquid–liquid phase separation, forming membraneless organelles (9–11).”
• Competing protein-RNA interaction networks control multiphase intracellular organization (2020, neutral): “A concentration threshold characterizes systems that undergo LLPS (Boeynaems et al., 2018; Brangwynne et al., 2015), raising the question of whether this is valid for G3BP-mediated SGs.”