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Thirty years of structural changes

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The concluding statement of Watson and Crick’s historic paper on the structure of DNA1 enshrines a key tenet of molecular mechanistic cell biology: “… the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”. Function — heredity in this case — is embedded in the redundant sequence information of the two strands of DNA. Although not always expressed as blatantly, the intimate dependence of cellular function on the mechanical level of macromolecules is inspirational. The devil is in the structural detail, and the painstaking quest for the correct details and their returns in the form of reliable knowledge knows no shortcuts.

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Acknowledgements

The author is supported by the Max Planck Society, and by grants from the European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant 951430 (BIOMECANET), the DFG’s Collaborative Research Centre ‘Molecular Mechanisms of Cell State Transitions’ (CRC 1430, project ID 424228829) and the CANTAR network under the Netzwerke-NRW program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanistic Cell Biology, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology, Dortmund, Germany

    Andrea Musacchio

  2. Max Planck School Matter to Life, Heidelberg, Germany

    Andrea Musacchio

  3. Centre for Medical Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, University Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Andrea Musacchio

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  1. Andrea Musacchio
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Correspondence to Andrea Musacchio.

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Musacchio, A. Thirty years of structural changes. Nat Struct Mol Biol 31, 4–5 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41594-023-01193-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41594-023-01193-3

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