Nature Chemical Biology, Published online: 06 October 2023; doi:10.1038/s41589-023-01437-9

Protein lipidation is an important post-translational modification that can be difficult to study. New amino acids with side chains that mimic naturally occurring lipid modifications stand to facilitate the study of lipidated proteins.

Nature Chemical Biology, Published online: 05 October 2023; doi:10.1038/s41589-023-01425-z

Reply to: Targeted protein S-nitrosylation of ACE2 inhibits SARS-CoV-2 infection

Nature Chemical Biology, Published online: 05 October 2023; doi:10.1038/s41589-023-01423-1

Endogenous currents in HEK 293 cells are inhibited by memantine

Nature Chemical Biology, Published online: 02 October 2023; doi:10.1038/s41589-023-01428-w

Determining which covalent binding events impact protein function is challenging. Now, a strategy has been reported that integrates base editing and chemical proteomics to infer the functionality of ligandable cysteines in cancer dependency proteins by quantifying the impact of their missense mutation on cancer cell proliferation.

Nature Chemical Biology, Published online: 28 September 2023; doi:10.1038/s41589-023-01432-0

Condensates have been proposed to create a distinct chemical solvating environment. In vitro condensate screens suggest that condensate chemical environments influence the intracellular distribution of small molecules.

Nature Chemical Biology, Published online: 28 September 2023; doi:10.1038/s41589-023-01431-1

Nou et al. engineered Bacillus subtilis cells into a living sentinel system, which can take up environmental DNA and fluoresce when a matching sequence is detected. This system enables recording of SNPs for facial features and has broad applications spanning forensics to agriculture.

Nature Chemical Biology, Published online: 28 September 2023; doi:10.1038/s41589-023-01426-y

The flavoenzyme nicotine oxidoreductase degrades nicotine in the bloodstream. Now, genetic selection in bacteria has been used to improve the catalytic performance of nicotine oxidoreductase, isolating variants with increased O2 reactivity that were more effective at degrading nicotine in the blood of rats.

Nature Chemical Biology, Published online: 25 September 2023; doi:10.1038/s41589-023-01442-y

Optimizing acid overproduction