Miranda

ZAP targets aberrant mRNA transcripts encoding proteins with defective signal peptides for degradation - The EMBO Journal The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is an important site for accurate folding and processing of secretory and membrane proteins. Signal peptides within such proteins are recognized by the signal recognitio...

ZAP targets aberrant mRNA transcripts encoding proteins with defective signal peptides for degradation
@colinwu.bsky.social and coworkers
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#NatMicroPicks

A chink in astrovirus armour 🦠💉

Human astrovirus serotypes 1–8 interact with cells all bind the FcRn receptor through a conserved spike‑protein surface depression revealing a potential antiviral treatment strategy.

#MicroSky

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

Polymerase trapping as the mechanism of H5 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus genesis Highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses (HPAIVs) derive from H5 and H7 low pathogenic avian influenza viruses (LPAIVs). Although insertion of a furin-cleavable multibasic cleavage site (MBCS) in the...

Transient RNA structures play a key role in the emergence of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses! Great to see this collaboration with Mathis Funk, Mathilde Richard, Stephen Cusack, and others in @science.org www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Erasmus MC and EMBL researchers reveal the molecular mechanisms by which avian influenza evolves from a mild to a highly pathogenic strain.

This occurs when the influenza polymerase makes an error while copying the viral RNA into host cells, adding extra fragments.

Imprinting by influenza virus infection in children can cause a deleterious shift of nearly the entire memory recall response against key, conserved epitopes @nature.com @weillcornell.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mosquito-borne viruses, vaccine-borne hope From chikungunya and dengue to yellow fever and Zika, mosquito‑transmitted diseases are spreading with urbanization, travel and climate change. A new generation of vaccines, trials and public‑health t...

A thoughtful overview in Nature Medicine on the growing global importance of arboviruses and emerging strategies to counter them.
It discusses our recent work on mosquito–host interactions. Encouraging to see this area receiving broader attention. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Oropouche virus infects primary human intestinal organoids and is inhibited by type I and III interferon treatment | mBio Oropouche virus (OROV) is an emerging arbovirus with rapidly increasing incidence and recent reports of severe disease outcomes. While gastrointestinal symptoms have been described, the intestinal tropism of OROV has not been experimentally explored. By combining meta-analysis of clinical data with human intestinal organoid infection models, we demonstrate that OROV can replicate in intestinal epithelial cells. We further show that, in a human intestinal organoid model, endogenous interferon responses are insufficient to restrict replication, while treatment with interferons exerts potent antiviral activity. These findings highlight the susceptibility of intestinal epithelial cells to OROV infection and the therapeutic potential of interferons.

Oropouche virus infects primary human intestinal organoids and is inhibited by type I and III interferon treatment journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

A single course of antibiotics can have lasting effects on your gut microbiome, with changes that last well beyond 4 years. Three types of antibiotics stood out for their long term disruptive impact (3 at left, Figure)
nature.com/articles/s41...

🐏 New study on wild bighorn sheep reveals major axes of immune variation across 581 individuals, driven by innate–adaptive trade-offs, inflammatory states, age, and sex.

A field‑ready toolkit for understanding wildlife immunity at scale.

🔗 vist.ly/4u8r6

#WildlifeHealth #EcoImmunology

Bacteriophages exploit lateral transduction to mobilize bacterial antiphage defense systems, reshaping how immune genes spread and influence pathogen evolution. 🦠🔁#Microbiology #Bacteriophage #HorizontalGeneTransfer #Evolution
📄 https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adx5749
👤 EVBC member: José R. Penadés

Host metabolic integration enables superior polystyrene degradation in cockroaches Plastic pollution is a global crisis, with polystyrene (PS) among the most recalcitrant polymers owing to its stable aromatic structure and resistance…

cool but icky research showing a cockroach species can utilise plastic polymer in its diet. Suggestion is changes in microbiome enable this although the analysis was on a small group so more needed to be done The polymer was mixed into feed so its not quite the same as munching on landfill plastic 🧪

New pre-print - this one was a really fun collaboration with colleagues in Italy with a neat finding a lot of coronaviruses reported as "recombinants" might not be (there are an awful lot of species and parts of the world not in the databases)

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Virus‐Dependent Geographic Structure of Co‐Circulating Viruses in a Single Bat Species Understanding the spatial spread of viruses within wildlife populations is often a key component of disease management efforts. Viral spread is likely constrained by host ecology, but inter-virus dif...

Excited to share my first paper! Co-circulating viruses in bats show diverse spatial movement patterns, perhaps due to different infection biology. Not all viruses move like their hosts, or like other viruses; Use them for inference with awareness and care!🧪 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Not all bat viruses spread the same way 🦇

A new study from @averyholmes.bsky.social & colleagues looked at six viruses in vampire bats in Peru & found contrasting patterns of circulation.

Some reflect bat movement, others were influenced by human activity.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🦠Orthohantaviruses are an emerging zoonotic threat in Europe. New research finds that the virus restructures the cytoskeleton and P bodies in human cells, potentially to form 'viral factories'. Read the full article by following the link🔗 https://doi.org/10.1099/jgv.0.002220

Lysine-11 ubiquitination drives type-I/III interferon induction by cGAS–STING and Toll-like receptors 3 and 4 - Nature Cell Biology Betrancourt, Cinko et al. identify ANKIB1-mediated K11 ubiquitination and OPTN recruitment as a shared mechanism for driving immune signalling by cGAS, TLR3 and TLR4, with functional relevance in inte...

Congratulations to the Walczak lab for this amazing piece of work just pulisbed on @natcellbio.nature.com
A must read!!!
This work adds a new letter of the ubiquitin code to immune signaling regulations!

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

Nice to be a part of this excellent study from the Walczak lab where K11 ubiquitin chains added by ANKIB1 are identified as being essential for TBK1-IRF3-driven interferon production downstream of pattern recognition receptors including TLR3 and cGAS. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dynamics of natural selection preceding human viral epidemics and pandemics Using a phylogenetic framework to characterize natural selection, we investigate the hypothesis that zoonotic viruses require adaptation prior to zoon…

There's a common misconception that zoonotic viruses require significant adaptation to jump from animals to cause human epidemics.

Not so 👇.

Further, we see clear signs of 1977 flu experiencing cell passage, prior to epidemic.

SARS-CoV-2? Business as usual.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@nitzantal.bsky.social @romihadary.bsky.social @soreklab.bsky.social use structure prediction and in silico binding site analysis to discover viral immune evasion proteins! Exciting for our lab @reneechang.bsky.social @riveralopz.bsky.social to help with this project.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Out today: We discovered new viral proteins that target immune signaling molecules, solely based on their AlphaFold-predicted shapes

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Congrats Nitzan Tal and coauthors! Thank you Kranzusch lab for the fun collaboration!

Linking below previous thread on our findings

After >10 years of our lab studying bacterial cGAS-like enzymes, @hobbslabutah.bsky.social finally reconstitutes viral sensing in vitro and discovers how these ancient receptors sense phage protease enzymes to detect virion assembly and activate antiviral immunity

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

CBASS is a cyclic nucleotide-based antiviral system in bacteria that is related to cGAS-STING signaling in animals. One of the big questions is how CBASS is activated during phage infection? We made some progress on this during my final year in the Kranzusch lab.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A phylogenetic tree of insects is shown annotating the presence or absence of a an antimicrobial peptide gene across winged insects

Various phylogenetic secondary loss events are mapped to a tree of insects to explain the parsimony calculations necessary to explain the diversity of insect Drosomycin antimicrobial peptide genes

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are key defence molecules of the innate immune system of plants and animals. Understanding the evolutionary origins of AMPs can help to explain how immune systems acquire novelty and vary in their defensive capabilities. However, AMPs evolve rapidly, and so the origins of similar AMPs across organisms is often unclear. Furthermore, false negatives due to low search sensitivity are common and can hinder confident annotations about true absences. Due to these difficulties, understanding whether similar AMP genes found in diverse organisms represent ancestral molecules or evolutionary novelties has been challenging. In this report, we present evidence of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) of the antifungal peptide gene Drosomycin across insects. We show that in Diptera, the presence of Drosomycin is restricted to the Melanogaster group and additionally the distant relative Drosophila busckii. We go on to recover Drosomycin genes in cockroaches (Blattodea), mantises (Mantodea), one katydid (Orthoptera), various beetles (Coleoptera), and a recently acquired pseudogenized Drosomycin locus in Liposcelis booklice (Psocodea), but no other insects. Explaining this diversity through shared ancestry requires at least 50 independent loss events, or just seven HGT events. Previous studies have suggested that similar AMPs found across divergent species reflect conservation from a common ancestor, or due to their small size, that they arose via convergent evolution resulting from pathogen-imposed selection. Our findings suggest horizontal gene transfer can be responsible for the presence of some AMP genes found scattered across the tree of life. By presenting a mechanism through which immune systems can acquire novelty, our study also suggests a possible explanation for certain lineage-specific competencies for defence against infectious disease. While loss of AMP genes is common in certain lineages, here we suggest gain of AMPs can occur just as suddenly.

Pleased to finally share this fun collab that began at #Ento23

@cedricaumont.bsky.social presented & I had seen NCBI annotated some cockroach genomes as "contaminated." Turns out NCBI & I were wrong (much more fun).

Horizontal transfer of an #AntimicrobialPeptide across insects
bit.ly/DrsHGT

1/🧵

Toll-like receptor signaling outcome is determined by the stoichiometry of the endogenous TRIFosome A previously entirely unknown mode of TLR signal transduction is elucidated.

#MysterySolved! Wellcome to the #TRIFosome! Kudos to @clarebryant.bsky.social & friends for visualizing filamentous TRIF @ Science Advances & showing that a supramolecular organizing center #SMOC is required for NfKB, not TBK1, signaling!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Deltaviruses spread through a viral Trojan Horse Hepatitis D-like satellite viruses, known as deltaviruses, have been recently discovered in a wide range of animals. These viruses are thought to expr…

The Trojan Horse is real, and it’s microscopic! 🐴🦠
Our paper is out today in @cellcellpress.bsky.social!
We discovered that deltaviruses physically hide INSIDE helper viruses to sneak into new cells. And to prove it, we had to image them from every angle. 🧵👇

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New study shows that virus prevalence in multispecies #BeeCommunities is shaped by the identity of key host species and the structure of their interaction networks, with implications for #DiseaseEcology. 🐝🦠#Ecology #NetworkScience
📄 https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70327
👤 EVBC member: Robert Paxton

After 3 years, I’m very happy to share my postdoc work which has been published in @natcomms.nature.com 🎉

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

✨ Thank you @arhelnathalie.bsky.social for your guidance and support !

#influenza #NPC #RANBP2 #Nup358 #Inflammation #ANE #AcuteNecrotizingEncephalopathy
#virology

A 3x3 grid of coloured images of influenza virus particles in the style of an Andy Warhol screen print. Image credit Naina Nair / Ed Hutchinson (MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research)

🚨New Influenza Tool🚨
Interested in IAV mutations?
Looking for markers of mammalian adaptation?
Frustrated by converting between IAV numbering systems?
The #Flu-MutationExplorer, a new tool from @cvrbioinfo.bsky.social and @royalvetcollege.bsky.social, is here to help:
flu-gdb.cvr.gla.ac.uk
(1/n)

Climate change in the WHO Pandemic Agreement negotiations: a qualitative study. Graph shows the evolution of different topics over different articles.

NEW PREPRINT! 🦠⚖️🌡️ The Pandemic Agreement is the first global health treaty to name climate change, and behind the scenes, the UNFCCC was a source of both inspiration and conflict. Cristina Arnés-Sanz and team tracked climate issues through three years of negotiations: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Animal organoids as transformative platforms for viral infections and zoonotic cross-species viral research | Journal of Virology As obligate intracellular parasites that rely on host cellular machinery for replication, viruses recall appropriate experimental models for elucidating virus-host interactions and pathogenic mechanisms. Traditionally, virology research has relied on two principal approaches: two-dimensional (2D) cell monolayers and in vivo animal models. Each methodology has contributed substantially to fundamental understanding of viral biology and pathogenesis, while presenting significant methodological constraints that would limit their translational relevance.

Animal organoids as transformative platforms for viral infections and zoonotic cross-species viral research journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...