Weekly Links #8
Cloned polo horses. A cell-free platform to screen protein binders. In ovo sexed eggs.
IMO the biggest biotech news of the week: You Can Now Buy Eggs From In-Ovo Sexed Hens! In the U.S., about 350 million male chicks are thrown into a blender each year, simply because the egg industry can’t use them to make, well, eggs. In ovo sexing technology using PCR or hyperspectral imaging to detect the sex of a chick inside the egg, such that farmers can destroy them before they feel pain. This is a huge win for animal welfare.
Atomic protein generation model, La-Proteina, from NVIDIA.
Oxford University Press is shuttering one of its journals, called Forensic Sciences Research, because several of its papers included “genetic data from Uyghurs” and subjects who “may not have freely consented to their DNA samples being used in the research.”
A cell-free platform to screen protein binders.
About “one in six papers across the natural and life sciences mischaracterize the findings in a paper they cite.” I would have guessed that this number would be far higher; it seems few scientists actually read all the papers they cite? (Link to study)
Where are all the AI drugs? A bit surface-level but exciting to see this is going mainstream.
Congressional Budget Office estimates that even a 10 percent reduction to the NIH budget “would prevent roughly 30 additional drugs from coming to market in the next three decades.” Trump administration proposed a nearly 40 percent cut.
The most hyped review article title of all time?
Biophysical requirements that govern the endosomal escape of designed mini-proteins.
A “capsule device” that delivers mRNA-loaded nanoparticles to the GI tract.
8 babies born in the U.K. with DNA from three parents (mitochondrial transfers). I recommend reading the primary literature for this one. See 1, 2, 3 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Coverage in BBC and Nature.
Imaging high-frequency voltage dynamics in multiple neuron classes of behaving mammals.
“…AAV capsids that lack AAVR2 binding can be bioengineered to engage with AAVR2,” an alternate receptor.
“…transcripts upregulated after sleep deprivation…encode almost exclusively proteins with roles in mitochondrial respiration and ATP synthesis.” Mitochondrial origins of sleep.
Predicting input signals of transcription factors in Escherichia coli. “By correlating TF activities with metabolite abundances, we successfully identified previously known TF–metabolite interactions and predicted novel TF effector metabolites for 41 TFs.”
A beautifully-written paper about a phage defense system.
Apparently if you co-culture photosynthetic algae with myoblasts in a hydrogel, the “microalgae-empowered muscle” produces “almost three times higher active force generation compared to conventional muscle…”
Design of intrinsically disordered region binding proteins.
Microglia replacement halts the progression of microgliopathy in mice and humans.
High-resolution structures of an archaeal ribosome. It has many differences, relative to bacterial ribosomes, in its peptidyl transferase center.
A stochastic model to understand how molecular noise influences the development of antibiotic resistance.
A computationally-designed protein that destroys other proteins.
Engineering plant receptors can strongly protect crops against pathogens. In this study, “a single engineered [immune receptor] can confer broad-spectrum and complete resistance against multiple potyviruses.” Recommended.
Fast, cost-effective and flexible DNA sequencing by roll-to-roll fluidics. Apparently this uses “up to 85-fold lower reagent consumption” than conventional next-generation sequencing?
A beautiful microfluidics paper, which shows how you can package two different cells into the same “bubble” and then study them together.
Animal cloning is big business in Argentina, especially amongst rich polo players. “A polo legend and a businessman joined forces to copy the player’s greatest horse. But with a single clone worth $800,000, some technologies are a breeding ground for betrayal.”