biomolecule

Every fall, Issaquah Creek in Washington State turns into a maternity ward for thousands of salmon. The fish swim in, spawn, and die, and the water carries away their molecular traces: fragments of DNA, short-lived RNA, chemical marks on the genetic text. From September through November 2024, researchers collected a liter of water every week and ran it through a filter to catch those traces.

A courier carrying a package enters a dense forest of intertwined ropes. He needs to deliver the cargo deep inside, but along the way he loses strength, and each step becomes harder. This is what an enzyme looks like as it degrades a dense gel of biological molecules. Until recently, no one could simultaneously see how the courier moves and how the forest thins out.

The liver is an orchestra in which every cell plays its part from a shared score. Males and females have different scores: in males, the genes responsible for detoxifying foreign substances and steroid hormones sound louder, while in females, the genes for fat metabolism and bile acids do.

Life begins with a bubble. In a warm puddle on ancient Earth, fat molecules could gather into tiny spheres — prototypes of cells. Inside such a sphere, a polymer happened to be present that accelerated the uptake of new fats from the surrounding water. The bubble grew, divided, and passed its composition to offspring.

Water in a glass looks continuous, but it's actually a dance of trillions of molecules constantly breaking and forming bonds. Seeing this dance in full detail was previously impossible: accurate calculations that account for the quantum properties of electrons could only handle tiny droplets of a few hundred atoms. The new model UBio-MolFM changes the game.

An interpreter gets distracted by every rustle in the hall, and a one-hour meeting stretches into two. Similarly, molecular foundation models learn the language of molecules from vast corpora, but each new conversation requires fine-tuning. Monroe changes the rules: it doesn't learn a new language but instantly finds common meaning from a few examples.

Epithelium lines our organs like tiles on a floor. At rest, cells cling to each other, and the tissue is elastic. But during embryonic development, wound healing, or tumor growth, this layer begins to flow like thick honey. What exactly triggers such softening?

When an antibody meets a virus, it doesn't latch on with a single death grip. Rather, it's like two bunches of grapes tumbling in water, catching each other with dozens of short tendrils. Each tendril is weak on its own, easily torn by the thermal jitter of water molecules, but together they hold tight.

Inside every cell, things are constantly meeting and parting. Some pairs hold tight, like Velcro, while others barely touch, like pollen on the wind. These fleeting touches, where the binding strength is comparable to a grain of salt dissolving in a glass of water, govern many of the cell's signals and decisions.

In 1970, mathematician John Conway invented the Game of Life — a cellular field where just three rules generate surprisingly complex patterns. Forty years later, SmoothLife appeared: a version where space is no longer cellular but smooth, like a blurred patch. The authors of the new study took an even simpler variant of this continuous game: now everything changes smoothly in time as well.

A bacterial biofilm is like a city made of slime. The houses are the microbes themselves. The streets and bridges are long polymer molecules that bacteria secrete outside. This whole construction is not static: the bridges are constantly breaking and re-forming. The authors built a "toy" computer model of such a city.

Erwin Schrödinger pondered how life maintains order despite the second law of thermodynamics. He could never have imagined that part of the answer lies hidden in the instability of giant stars.

The search for life beyond Earth is like tuning an old radio: we listen to the chemical whisper of distant exoplanets' atmospheres, trying to pick up signs of biological activity.

Think of a massive cookbook: each recipe is a protein, and the finished dish is its job in the cell. To whip up a complex treat, you often need to mix several ingredients and let them 'set' into the right shape. Until now, scientist-chefs could only guess how someone else's recipes would fold.

DNA methylation consists of tiny chemical marks on our genes. Over the years, they change on a fairly strict schedule. Standard epigenetic clocks look at these marks and output a single number: biological age. But a number can't tell you how the pattern of marks rearranged day by day, year by year. The authors of this work decided to turn a static photograph into a continuous film.

In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger asked the question "What is life?", foreshadowing quantum explanations of biology. Almost a century later, physicists return to this puzzle, armed with the apparatus of quantum field theory.

Imagine a book being simultaneously copied by trillions of scribes. As long as most of them check against the original, the narrative remains meaningful. But once control weakens, the text accumulates typos, which multiply until the manuscript turns into gibberish.

Life is a constant dance between order and chaos. Back in the mid-20th century, Erwin Schrödinger noted that living things feed not so much on matter as on "negative entropy"—the ability to maintain their own order by increasing disorder around them.

For a long time, we only saw proteins in their final form — like photographs of dancers frozen in a beautiful pose. Programs like AlphaFold learned to predict that pose from a chain of carbon links. But the real magic is how a protein finds this shape faster than you can blink, performing a swift dance.

Billions of tiny motors hum inside every living creature. Cells ceaselessly pump substances, burn sugar, and build new proteins, and all this invisible motion warms us from within. To maintain order, life must dissipate heat into the environment, like a stove that never goes out. The power of this internal heating is almost independent of size.

From carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, you can assemble 10⁶⁰ different small molecules: that's a 1 with 60 zeros, more than the stars in the visible universe. Life uses only a tiny fraction of this menu, but not randomly.

A supernova is the final explosion of a massive star, scattering its material over light-years. Inside the expanding shell, a neutron star remains, and the shell itself continues to plow through interstellar gas for thousands of years.

The Standard Model is a set of rules for all known particles. But it says nothing about dark matter, which makes up a quarter of the Universe. To find it, you don't need to build city-sized colliders. Radioactive molecules act like sniffer dogs: their incredible 'scent' picks up the faintest traces of unknown forces that slip past giant machines.

An orchestra plays without a conductor. Each musician has a score: that's the genes. But the volume and tempo depend on the acoustics of the hall, the mood, and the neighbors on stage. That's roughly how heredity and daily life together shape a teenager's behavior.

Three craftsmen work in the same workshop. The first tries to figure out whether tiny hourglasses are built into nature's own machinery. The second attaches a laser pointer to a microscope to see details invisible to the naked eye. The third, conversely, takes living threads and carefully weaves them into fragile quantum circuits.

Every shell is a stone diary of growth. The mollusk doesn't build it from a blueprint like an architect; it simply adds material along the edge, following the same rule over and over. It's as if a snail glued a new strip to its house each day, nudging it slightly sideways and making it a bit bigger. It's this repetition, not complex control, that creates the species' characteristic shape.

Long protein threads, their tangled entanglements, and random contacts: this is how the birth of cellular droplets was usually explained. These membrane-less organelles, where important reactions take place, resemble oil drops in water: they arise on their own when molecules separate into phases.

The nose is an amazing instrument. A single coffee molecule entering a nostril can awaken a memory of a morning kitchen. Another, nearly identical in shape, smells like rotten eggs.

Yeast are trapped in a clear gel, like raisins in jelly. They can't move on their own, but soon they start rising to the top. The secret lies in their own homemade fizz. During fermentation, yeast release carbon dioxide. In a thick medium, the gas doesn't escape but accumulates until bubbles form.

Inside a cell, there are tiny liquid droplets, like oil droplets in water. They form from proteins and RNA and serve all sorts of purposes, from storing molecules to speeding up reactions. But if droplets start merging with each other, you'd end up with one big puddle, which would wreck the cell's organization.

A chemical detective searches for life on other planets. Its tool is a mass spectrometer that identifies molecules by weight (the same device earthly forensic scientists use to analyze clues).

Modern microscopes see the brain in exquisite detail: not just the synapses themselves, the contact points between neurons, but also the molecules they are made of. Such images are becoming more common and cheaper to produce.

A scanning tunneling microscope probes a molecule with an ultra-fine tip and maps its relief. But the image is flat, while the molecule is three-dimensional. How do you guess a person's pose from their shadow on a wall?

The lymphatic system is like a city's network of canals, through which water slowly moves, carrying away waste from tissues. But it has no single pump-heart. Instead, along the vessels are placed small station-locks — lymphangions. Each such lock squeezes itself like a fist and pushes fluid onward. How they coordinate their work has long remained a mystery.

Proteins are chains of amino acids, and they often contain repeated chunks. Sometimes the repeats are exact, like the same phrase said twice. Sometimes they come with typos: a couple of letters swapped, but the meaning is the same. These repeats matter: they help the protein fold into the right shape and do its job.

A drop of ink in a glass of water spreads out on its own. But if the ink were made of tiny motors, they wouldn't just spread: they'd crawl, jostle, and cluster into swarms. Such self-propelled particles are called active. You can assemble them into molecules like beads on a bracelet. And here's the surprise: the order of beads on the bracelet changes everything.

A cell is a city where tiny motors work nonstop. They carry cargo, move cilia, and make muscles contract. All this work generates heat, just like a car engine warms up. But measuring the heat from a single motor a few nanometers in size is no easy task. Stochastic modeling helps us peek into this world.

As an embryo grows, its cells don't just divide: they constantly touch their neighbors, like people in a crowded bus. The strength of these contacts determines where a cell moves and what shape the tissue takes. Scientists studied how cell 'stickiness' changes during the earliest stages of development.

Cells in our bodies are not rigid bricks but rather squishy sponges soaked in water. Their softness or stiffness matters: cancer cells are often softer than healthy ones, and cartilage must withstand pressure with every step. To measure this stiffness without touching the tissue, scientists use light.

In the mud at the bottom of a pond live bacteria that carry tiny magnetic compass needles inside them. These needles are chains of magnetite crystals that help the bacteria swim along Earth's magnetic field, like a compass needle, in search of better conditions.