How do human cells defend against viruses?
@sgfern.bsky.social discovers that human immune proteins named ISGs target ancient features of replication shared between animal and bacterial viruses – opening analysis of human immunity to the power of bacterial genetics
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
New preprint! 🚨
Phage proteins don't act alone. Phages rely on homooligomerisation to assemble identical protein subunits into functional forms. But figuring out those exact configurations experimentally is tough. Learn about our approach in our new preprint! 👇 (1/n)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
www.biorxiv.org
@romihadary.bsky.social and @soreklab.bsky.social 's discovery that sponge proteins constitute enormous families of viral immune evasion factors is now out in @natmicrobiol.nature.com
@reneechang.bsky.social and our lab were happy to help with this story!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Malnak, @bushmanlab.bsky.social et al. demonstrate how structural information can be used to overcome the limits of sequence-based methods and uncover fundamental principles of viral diversity and evolution.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msag110
#evobio #molbio #virus
A newly released AI tool has generated an atlas of more than one billion predicted protein structures and billions more protein sequences.
go.nature.com/4wS3Pen
How do sperm and egg fuse? Surprisingly, we still don’t fully know…
Our field has uncovered many pieces of the fertilization puzzle, but not how they fit together.
We identify ✨ SPARK ✨ - a conserved sperm complex that couples sperm-egg binding to fusion.
tinyurl.com/34cm4xat
Read on! 🧵👇
Kranzusch Lab
bioRxivpreprint
A functional screen reveals phage sponge proteins that bind Pycsar, Thoeris and CBASS signalling molecules to inhibit bacterial immunity.
🍻 Science belongs everywhere – even in the pub! Pint of Science is a science festival bringing researchers into the pubs next door: Tonight, Perutz PI Tom Leonard connected Max Perutz, Artemis II, and kinase research in his talk, while AITHYRA PI Jason Nomburg shared his fascination for viruses 🦠
Video
The new open-source atlas, generated by an AI tool called ESMFold2, vastly increases the known protein universe.
Folddisco is now published @natbiotech.nature.com. It’s a fast motif search for similar 3D DISCOntinuous residues like catalytic sites or zinc fingers across the entire protein universe.
📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
💾 folddisco.foldseek.com
🌐 https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco
Do you enjoy the thrill of discovery? Does this photo give you good vibes?
Then you might be the right person to join our lab!
Current projects range from chloroplast transcription to thylakoid membrane remodeling & we would be happy to welcome bright and motivated people at all career stages!
Molecular Biology and Evolution
Nature
www.nature.com
Folddisco enables protein structural motif search in million scale databases.
Two major breakthroughs for the nucleotide immune signaling field in pre-print by @romihadary.bsky.social @soreklab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(1) Beautiful bioinformatic analyses reveal known viral nucleotide sponges are members of enormous protein families ubiquitous in phages
Kranzusch Lab
Max Perutz Labs Vienna
Silvia Ramundo
Folddisco finds similar (dis)continuous 3D motifs in large protein structure databases. Its efficient index enables fast uncharacterized active site annotation, protein conformational state analysis and PPI interface comparison. 1/9🧶🧬
📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🌐 search.foldseek.com/folddisco
