Ben Davis Group

Application of a sunlight-switched sugar signal increases wheat yield in the field - Nature Biotechnology Crop yield improvement has plateaued in the past three decades, owing largely to genetic bottlenecks in the germplasm of staple food crops. We used a chemical intervention method that increases yield ...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Biocompatible ligand balancing in transition metal coordination enables benign in-cell protein arylation - Nature Chemistry The perceived toxicity of organometallic reagents has limited their use in living systems. Now it has been shown that balancing flexible chelation with biocompatible ligands without precluding chemica...

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Engineered nanobodies facilitate cryo-EM studies of small proteins - Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology In this Tools of the Trade article, Yi and Mamalis (Gilbert and Davis labs) discuss the development of Di-Gembodies, innovative constructs designed to overcome key challenges in applying cryo-electron...

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Mapping Vibronic Dynamics of Ultrafast Intersystem Crossing in an Earth-Abundant Ligand-Field Excited Complex Intersystem crossing (ISC) is a central nonradiative pathway in transition-metal complexes, critically shaping their behavior in photocatalysis and optoelectronics. In 3d metal systems, ligand-field (LF, d–d) excited states are especially important, yet the mechanisms governing their ISC remain obscure because LF transitions are commonly masked by intense metal-to-ligand charge-transfer (MLCT) bands. This knowledge gap is significant, as LF states frequently participate in deactivation channels and directly influence the photochemical reactivity. Here, we focus on unraveling the ultrafast ISC dynamics in a carefully chosen model system with a simplified electronic structure: cobalt(III)-acetylacetonate, ([Co(acac)3]), a d6 low-spin complex. Upon selective 1A1 → 1T1 ligand-field excitation promoting a t2g → eg * electron, heterodyne-detected transient grating measurements with ∼10 fs pulses reveal vibrational coherences decaying in ∼50 fs, matching ISC dynamics. Fourier analysis reveals both low- and high-frequency vibrational modes associated with Co–O stretching and Co–O–C bending that actively mediate the spin-state transition. Complementary two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES) disentangles overlapping signals and localizes vibrational activity near the 1T1 excited-state absorption. Density functional theory (DFT) and GPU-accelerated hierarchy equation of motion (HEOM) calculations confirm that vibronic coupling, in concert with spin–orbit coupling (SOC), enables rapid singlet-to-triplet conversion via dynamic modulation of excited-state energies and reorganization along key nuclear coordinates. These results reveal that following LF excitation vibronic coupling plays an important role in reshaping excited-state potential energy surfaces and facilitating ISC in systems where SOC alone is weak. This work establishes a mechanistic foundation for understanding and controlling excited-state pathways in LF-dominated 3d transition-metal complexes.

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

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Gluebodies Offer a Route To Improve Crystal Reliability and Diversity through Transferable Nanobody Mutations That Introduce Constitutive Close Contacts Design of modular, transferable protein assemblies has broad applicability and in structural biology could help with the ever-troublesome crystallization bottleneck, including finding robustly behaved...

doi.org/10.1021/acsc...

High-throughput discovery of a [4+3] dearomative cycloaddition enables dual photochemical-photophysical perturbative probing of protein function Proteins exist in multiple conformations or states, often associated with different functional capacities. The ability to selectively identify and study these states is crucial for under-standing the ...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Covalently constrained ‘Di-Gembodies’ enable parallel structure solutions by cryo-EM - Nature Chemical Biology Disulfide-based dimerization of modified identical and heterologous nanobody scaffolds enables higher-order assembly for high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy structure determination that is widely...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Biomolecular tracking by FIRESCAPE reveals distinct modes of clearance, damage induction and cellular uptake for extracellular histone H3 In attempting to observe the behaviour of a protein of interest in vivo, akin to other observer effects, current techniques require modifications or interventions that inherently alter the protein or ...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Seedless: on-the-fly pulse calculation for NMR experiments - Nature Communications The authors develop a computational tool to design NMR pulses, based on the GRadient Assisted Pulse Engineering approach, that can calculate optimal pulse shapes on the fly during the measurements, to...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

BGD has been awarded the ICS's Barry Cohen Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry for 2025. www.chemistry.org.il/prizes-page/...

Live-cell 3D-SIM of Rift Valley fever virus NSs filaments reveals a polygonal web architecture A defining feature of Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) is the incorporation of the NSs protein into large filamentous assemblies inside infected nuclei [1][1], as judged from fixed specimens. To gain in...

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thio-NHS esters are non-innocent protein acylating reagents - Nature Communications N-Hydroxysuccinimide (NHS)-ester derivatives are one of the most widely used acylating agents. In this work, the authors report that ring-opening reaction of the succinimide to afford N-succinamide de...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Small-molecule dissolution of stress granules by redox modulation benefits ALS models - Nature Chemical Biology Uechi et al. found that a small-molecule lipoamide dissolves stress granules (SGs) by targeting SFPQ, a redox-sensitive disordered SG protein, alleviating pathological phenotypes caused by amyotrophic...

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Membrane-permeable trehalose 6-phosphate precursor spray increases wheat yields in field trials - Nature Biotechnology A sunlight-activated chemical spray increases wheat yield in field trials across rainfall conditions.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New biostimulant treatment significantly boosts wheat yields, field A novel biostimulant could deliver increased wheat yields of up to 12%, according to researchers from Oxford University, Rothamsted, and the Rosalind Franklin Institute in a long-term study published

www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-04...

BBC Radio 4 - Farming Today, 30/4/25 Welsh community food strategy, British-grown pulses, biostimulant for wheat New community food strategy for Wales.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Addressing NHS chemistry: Efficient quenching of excess TMT reagent and reversing TMT-over labelling in proteomic samples by methylamine, Mol Cell Proteomics, 2025, 24(4), 100948, doi.org/10.1016/j.mc...

BGD has been awarded the ACS's Hudson Award for 2025. acscarb.org/awards/hudso...

Isostere 18F-protein post-translational editing enables dynamic tracking of neurodegeneration biomarkers The neurofilament light chain protein (NfL) is a suggested general marker for neuronal loss. Its release from brain parenchyma into cerebral spinal fluid, and presumed detection in blood has seen it e...

Isostere 18F-protein post-translational editing enables dynamic tracking of neurodegeneration biomarkers, bioRxiv 2025.01.26.634877; doi: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Lipid-Modulated, Graduated Inhibition of N-Glycosylation Pathway Priming Suggests Wide Tolerance of ER Proteostasis to Stress Protein N-glycosylation is a cotranslational modification that takes place in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Disruption of this process can result in accumulation of misfolded proteins, known as ER s...

Lipid-Modulated, Graduated Inhibition of N-Glycosylation Pathway Priming Suggests Wide Tolerance of ER Proteostasis to Stress, ACS Cent. Sci., 2025, 11, 107-115, doi.org/10.1021/acsc...

Structure of WzxE the lipid III flippase for Enterobacterial Common Antigen polysaccharide | Open Biology The enterobacterial common antigen (ECA) is conserved in Gram-negative bacteria of the Enterobacterales order although its function is debated. ECA biogenesis depends on the Wzx/Wzy-dependent strategy...

Structure of WzxE the Lipid III Flippase for Enterobacterial Common Antigen Polysaccharide, Open. Biol., 2025, 15, 240310, doi.org/10.1098/rsob...

Start with some...Thoughts for the Future, Nature Chemical Biology, 2025, 21, 6-15; doi.org/10.1038/s415...