"Heart" of the spliceosome: putting together a molecular machine

Splicing is a fundamental process in the expression of our genetic information. It requires a complex molecular machinery, which needs to be made and recycled. Both of these processes are poorly understood, but scientists from the lab of Clemens Plaschka at the IMP now added an important piece of the puzzle: they showed how the molecular "scaffolding" of the splicing machinery transforms through four stages to return to an early state. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.