RNA Polymerase and Transcription Mechanism: Forefront of Physicochemical Study

Dear Colleagues,

For a half century, the study on the mechanism of RNA polymerase has been one of the top runners in terms of using newly developed methods. The obtained results on transcriptional regulation have stimulated biomedical applications such as drug discovery targeting RNA polymerases, and thus, physicochemical and genetic analyses of RNA polymerases and their accessary molecules have acquired a biomedical significance. However, recently, such a multidisciplinary method development appears to become slow or is perhaps saturated. We tend to believe that our image on biological macromolecules has been perfectly established, but it has not well been recognized that methodological saturation is partly caused by a lack of understanding of physicochemical properties of biological macromolecules, including the surrounding water molecules. For example, conventional time-averaging does not always provide the correct data and can lead to misunderstanding. It is also useful to clarify the limitation of tools that were originally developed for simpler polymers and small molecules and later applied for biomolecules.

The main goal of this Special Issue of Biomolecules is to clarify the ignored properties of macromolecules by rethinking the basis of chemical reaction in transcriptional regulations.

The topics includes (i) experimental and analytical tools for inhomogeneity of protein conformations and (ii) the contribution of thermal processes in transcriptional regulation, such as Brownian ratchet and one-dimensional diffusion.

Prof. Nobuo Shimamoto
Dr. Masahiko Imashimizu
Guest Editors

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