RNAs exhibit distinct structural and dynamic features required for proper function. The hydrogen-bonded imino protons of RNAs are a probe of the conformational transition and dynamic feature. MicroRNAs originate from primary transcripts containing hairpin structures. The levels of mature miR156 influence the flowering time of plants. To understand the molecular mechanism of biological function of $miR156:miR156^*$ duplex, we performed hydrogen exchange study on the model RNAs mimicking two phenotypes of $miR156:miR156^*$, $miR156:miR156^*$ (m-miR156a) and $miR156:miR156^*$ (m-miR156g) duplexes. This study found that the internal bulge of m-miR156a destabilized the neighboring base-pairs, whereas the bulge structure of m-miR156g did not affect the thermal stabilities of the neighboring base-pairs.

Caveolae are small plasma membrane invaginations that play many roles in signal transduction, endocytosis, mechanoprotection, lipid metabolism. The most important protein in caveolae is the integral membrane protein, caveolin, which is divided into three families such as caveolin 1, caveolin 2, and caveolin 3. Caveolin 1 and 3 are known to incorporate palmitate through linkage to three cysteine residues. Regulation of the protein palmitoylation cycle is important for the cellular processes such as intracellular localization of the target protein, membrane association, conformation, protein-protein interaction, and activity. However, the detailed aspect of individual palmitoylation has not been studied. In the present work, the role of each lipid modification at three cysteines was studied by NMR. Our results suggest that each lipid modification at the natively palmitoylation site has its own roles. For example, lipidations to C106 and C129 are play a role in structural stabilization, however, interestingly, lipid modification to C116 interrupts the structural stabilization.

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) is one of the most popular solid-state spin systems for quantum sensing. NV has been used for vector magnetometry with nanometer spatial resolution and sensors for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in samples with small volume, less than 10 pL. Various studies are in progress to make NV a complementary sensor for current NMR technique. Fabricating and improving diamond itself are one of the research topics. This mini-review contains recent develops in diamond fabrication and treatment for higher NV yield. Additionally, we briefly introduce the development status of NV in NMR.

Overhauser dynamic nuclear polarization (O-DNP) has been an efficient method to boost the thermal nuclear polarization in liquids at room temperature. However, O-DNP for a benchtop NMR using a permanent magnet has remained unexplored yet. In this work, we report the development of an O-DNP system adopting a permanent magnet of 1.6 T. Q-band (~43 GHz) high-power amplifier produced 6 W microwave for saturation. Instead of resonator, we used an open-type antenna for the microwave irradiation. For several representative small molecules, we measured the concentration and frequency dependences of the enhancement factor. This work paves the way for the development of a benchtop DNP-NMR system overcoming its disadvantage of low quality signal when using a permanent magnet.