Faces, facets, and functions of biomolecular condensates driven by multivalent proteins and nucleic acids

Bacterial Transcriptional Regulators: A Road Map for Functional, Structural, and Biophysical Characterization

“…Thus, it is interesting to consider the impact of the observed membraneless organelles in transcription, as they could be affecting transcription reaction rates by spatially regulating diffusion-controlled binding processes with DNA [167,168]. This is an exciting direction of future research, as the limit of microscopy techniques to identify these condensates has significantly improved in recent years, enabling us to find them even in bacteria where the size is usually close to the diffraction limit [159,169,170]. This is particularly relevant for bacterial transcriptional regulation, as many of these proteins contain intrinsically disordered regions IDRs [105,115,124,171,172] (Figure 3A,C,D,H-J), which is a common feature of proteins included in condensates [173][174][175].…”

“…Observing condensates in bacteria will continue to benefit from the advances in super-resolution microscopy and other techniques [178], as they are significantly smaller compared to eukaryotic condensates [169]. Recently developed photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM) and stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM), as well as cryogenic super-resolution imaging, are valuable tools to evaluate condensates in bacteria [159,179].…”