"Russian flu," the pandemic that hit in 1977, bears an evolutionary signature of having emerged from a lab, perhaps as part of a failed vaccine effort. Covid, mpox, Ebola, and other influenza pandemics don't. Here's my story on a new way to trace the origins of pandemics. Gift link: nyti.ms/46N0W33
This is very underwhelming. Evo2 can learn how to collect all of the low hanging fruit (ORFs, start sites, exon-intron boundaries, promoters). Don't we already have a large plethora of algorithms that can do all this? Any new insights? None that I can see. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
I guess, but I don't see how a peptide reproduces. Viruses and other parasites use host machinery to duplicate their own information molecules and reproduce. If a peptide enters a proto-cell, I'm not sure how the peptide coaxes the proto-cell into making more of the same peptide.
Can a sequence of amino acids exist as a fully separate entity that is not tied to its nucleic acid coding? This seems to contradict the Central Dogma, as explained by Crick (i.e. that once information is in peptide form, it is dead).
Was the ribosome originally a parasite? Seems fantastical to me. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
Just a reminder - Please Register for the 3rd Codon Usage Conference in Montreal, Canada from May 31- June 3, right after the RNA Society Meeting.
Even if you can't go, please share! #RNA #RNAsky #RNAbiology
sites.google.com/view/codonus...
New paper alert: Paralog interference contributes to the preservation of genetic redundancy www.cell.com/current-biol...
🎉Proud to present our latest paper, out now in Nature Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
RNA Binding Proteins (RBPs) are often full of intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs), but what these regions do during RNA recognition is often unclear. 1/10
#RNA #IDR #RBP
Except that most NHLers are Canadian.
Many living people carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA, remnants of ancient interbreeding events, with uneven distribution across chromosomes. New work by @sarahtishkoff.bsky.social lab suggests patterns are most consistent with Neanderthal contribution to human populations being highly male biased.🧪
I’m thrilled to share that my PhD work has been just published in Cell. After a long and bumpy ride, we uncovered the core function of nuclear speckles -splicing of GC-levelled exons- and traced the evolution of this gene architecture and condensates themselves to amniotes.
A colorful poster illustration featuring 15 species of animals from the Cambrian period 541-485 million years ago. These are mostly unusual looking invertebrates, such as Hurdia, Wiwaxia, Anomalocaris, Peytoia, trilobites, Marrella, Nectocaris, Hallucigenia, Opabinia, Plectronoceras, Lyrarapax, and Naraoia. An early chordate (Pikaia) is also included. The animals are brightly colored on a dark black background. White numbers with a key label each species.
Creatures of the Cambrian period!
Before he passed away in 2021, Tom Cavalier-Smith had drafted parts of his autobiography. It's now 'published' because Gáspár Jékely put a lot of effort in! Please enjoy and share: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
Sweden, France, and Germany have all called for their citizens to leave Iran immediately.
Markets are closed now, so if I’m guessing… strike window any time between now and March 7.
I would anticipate sooner than later, but who knows what Trump will do.
Our paper is now out in Nature:
“Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres”
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres.
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Scientists have seen Asgard archaea crawling for the first time. When it comes to the origin of eukaryotes, this is like seeing a feathered dinosaur in the wild. (Video courtesy of Philipp Ralder)
Selection of U-rich sequences reminds me of A-rich selection by the HUSH complex to silence sense transposons (I beleieve in non germ line cells). This also reminds me of how introns (at least in vertebrates) tend to be U-rich and exons A-rich (but short). www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/...
Very cool work. I will have to integrate this into general nucleotide trends.
New paper from my team detailing a greatly expanded genomic database of Asgard archaea revealing of high energy metabolism those related to eukaryotes! Led by @katyappler.bsky.social lots of help from @jameslingford.bsky.social @valdeanda.bsky.social @kassipan.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415...
TBH I still think that the "RNA world" was preceded by something else along the lines of metabolism-first theory. And that's how monomers came to be.
That old saw about how "good times make weak men" is true in the sense that stable times with material abundance create reactionaries who want to destroy the systems that protect them because they're too sheltered and stupid to understand that things can get meaningfully worse. Jason CO @jasonc_nc. 2/8/25 I don't think a lot of people appreciate how much of their overall lifestyle and relative certainty is backstopped by a steady, boring stability of systems they don't understand or even realize exist. • 24 L7 1.8K 15K Ill 399K ... Max Dubler @maxdubler True decadence looks like people who are three generations removed from the cultural memory of polio refusing to vaccinate their children against deadly communicable diseases because they don't like needles and don't think there will be any consequences, not queer
So much of our present crisis is coddled, ignorant, and short sighted people tearing down the institutions that protect them because they don’t understand that bad things can happen.
Ooops. You are 100% correct.
When I read that this was mediated by IL3 I laughed. This freakin' protein appears in all the RNA-interactome and ribosome-interactome mass specs (including ours) and no one knew what it did.
Ever notice that when one gene is disrupted, its orthologs get upregulated? This phenomenon, known as transcriptional adaptation, has been controversial and mysterious - glad to see that we are starting to learn how it works.
Wow! Great story! (The so called "God" molecule has been found!!!! I had to say it, since no one else has yet!)
How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller?
Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase.
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I am thrilled to share our paper introducing RBPscan, a novel approach to profile RNA–protein interactions in living cells. Free access link at the end ⬇️ 🧵 1/
www.cell.com/molecular-ce...
They can't have it both ways. If they want to exercise their "freedom" then we are also free to dismiss them and downgrade their credibility; if they hide behind "jokes", then we are also free to downgrade their credibility due to their shallowness, mortal unseriousness and intellectual laziness.
