First paper with the lab's affiliation!! ✨✨ summarising some of the cool concepts that the Antigen Evolution & Design Lab will be working on! Together with amazing collaborators @mghafari.bsky.social and @grovearmada.bsky.social www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Studying the Deep Evolution of Viruses in the Era of Artificial Intelligence Structure Prediction

High mutation rates erode viral sequence similarity, obscuring deep evolutionary history. While protein structure is far more conserved than sequence, its use in evolutionary studies has historically ...

annualreviews.org

Lab member suggests our new lab motto should be: Take that, evolution! Previous Royle Lab mottos/in-jokes... - Cells don't lie - Papers, Productivity, Hope ✨ - No retreat, no surrender! - We're not impressed until we're “in press”. What's your current lab motto? 🧪

New Experimental Google Colab Notebook now integrates AlphaFold3 with OpenFold3 and py2Dmol: colab.research.google.com/github/sokry... (1/3)

Today my laboratory is thrilled to announce a major breakthrough in the fight against the common cold and other diseases like hand,foot, and mouth disease acute flaccid myelitis caused by picornaviruses. We present the first structure of picornaviral 2C, bound to ssRNA (1/n)

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

Our two-part analysis of the current MV Hondius Andes virus outbreak is now live, including reconstruction of the outbreak molecular clock dating of the closest known ancestors of the outbreak lineage. Part 1: outbreak sequence reconstruction and rooting virological.org/t/molecular-...

Molecular evolutionary analysis of the current MV Hondius Andes virus outbreak

Preliminary reconstruction of the current MV Hondius Andes virus outbreak sequences Note on data use This is an informal analysis of currently available consensus sequences and is not intended as a fo...

virological.org

With Eugene Koonin, we wrote a rather comprehensive review on the origin, evolution and organization of the #virosphere. We describe all 10 viral realms and the logic behind them, and so much more. Check it out! comptes-rendus.academie-sciences.fr/biologies/ar...

We are incredibly excited to see our most recent story out @nature.com today:HIV triggers CD4-signaling to remodel nuclear pores and license infection!A heroic effort led by our very own @d-mesner.bsky.social & @mattvxwhelan.bsky.social! @blizardinstitute.bsky.social Link: tinyurl.com/HIVNup 1/11

A new family of rolling-circle replication endonucleases widespread in archaeal viruses and plasmids. This family is unrelated to the HUH superfamily Reps, but distantly related to the bacterial Rep_trans enzymes. @narjournal.bsky.social academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Took a long time to get this done, 2-3 years on Figure 1 alone but glad it's finally out!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Heart-nosed bat alphacoronaviruses use human CEACAM6 to enter cells - Nature

Human CEACAM6, which is widely expressed in the lung, is identified as a receptor used by the spike proteins of Cardioderma cor (heart-nosed bat) alphacoronaviruses to enter cells.

nature.com

We did a thing: Scientists find a new way coronaviruses can get into human cells www.cam.ac.uk/research/new...

Scientists find a new way coronaviruses can get into human cells

An international team of researchers has identified an East African bat coronavirus capable of entering human cells.

cam.ac.uk

Excellent job Sarah. Well done!

Joseph Hughes@bljog.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Great delivery by Sarah Little from @grovearmada.bsky.social team @microbiologysociety.org : Scalable Screening of AI Designed Binders that Prevent Virus Entry

Great delivery by Sarah Little from @grovearmada.bsky.social team @microbiologysociety.org : Scalable Screening of AI Designed Binders that Prevent Virus Entry

Structures of Marburgvirus glycoprotein and its complex with NPC1 receptor doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Structures of Marburgvirus glycoprotein and its complex with NPC1 receptor - Nature

Marburgvirus glycoprotein binds to the endosomal receptor NPC1 in a distinct orientation with higher affinity compared with Ebola virus glycoprotein, accompanied by fusion-relevant rearrangements...

doi.org

I know I am late to the party on this one, but @thrasherxy.bsky.social's The Viral Underclass is *so* good in analysing why the people most excluded from society are also the people in it who are most likely to experience disease. It's incisive, readable, and defiantly hopeful. And also...

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...

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…

sciencedirect.com

We found a viral Trojan Horse: a virus can hide inside another virus.This one surprised us: deltaviruses don’t just borrow a helper virus. They can travel inside it. A literal Trojan Horse “virus-in-a-virus” route into cells. 🤯 Kudos to 1st author @viroscope.bsky.social and co-authors !

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…

sciencedirect.com

“It’s a major advance, on the scale of an AlphaFold4. The problem, of course, is that we know nothing of the details.” Isomorphic Lab’s proprietary drug-discovery model is a major advance go.nature.com/3Mm2ZnQ

‘An AlphaFold 4’ – scientists marvel at DeepMind drug spin-off’s exclusive new AI

Isomorphic Lab’s proprietary drug-discovery model is a major advance, but scientists developing open-source tools are left guessing how to achieve similar results.

go.nature.com

Exploring ICTV virus metadata just got easier on ViralZone — interactive table, instant CSV export, and full search. The new species names are displayed alongside virus names and acronyms. viralzone.expasy.org/resources/VM... (source: ictv.global/vmr)

Chikungunya is on the march in Europe www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Excruciating tropical disease can now be transmitted in most of Europe, study finds

‘Shocking’ data shows the climate crisis and invasive mosquitos mean chikungunya could spread in 29 countries

theguardian.com

It is almost five years since I first applied AlphaFold to a handful of viral proteins. Today, hundreds of thousands of predictions and many discoveries later, we are delighted to announce the integration of our Viro3D dataset into the @ebi.embl.org and Google DeepMind AlphaFold Database.

EMBL-EBI@ebi.embl.org · 6mo ago

The AlphaFold Database, jointly developed with Google DeepMind, now contains datasets from specialist communities. This includes rich datasets for microbes, viruses & parasites associated with tropical diseases. Explore the new datasets in the AlphaFold Database. www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/u...

Very excited to share our work, a fish herpesvirus' cryo EM structure. It features a long PVAT tail, with new and host-like proteins discovered using modelAngelo, Dali, and Viro3D, including a host-like macrodomain doi.org/10.64898/202... @dbhella.bsky.social @grovearmada.bsky.social

Cryo-EM of a Divergent Herpesvirus Reveals Structural Conservation and Novelty Including a Portal-Vertex Tegument Protein with Multiple Macrodomain-like Folds www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.13.705735v1 #cryoEM

A near-complete map of human cytosolic degrons and their relevance for disease We measured degron potency of >200,000 30-residue tiles from >5,000 human proteins, and trained a model to predict degrons from sequence Led by @vvouts.bsky.social in @rhp-lab.bsky.social doi.org/10.1126/scia...

This is finally out. Very short take home. All the variation in spike that produced the immune escape characteristics of Omicron can occur in one single persistently infected individual over the period of a year. This is why persistent infections matter www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Antibody escape drives emergence of diverse spike haplotypes resembling variants of concern in persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections

Snell et al. develop sequencing methodology to identify full-length spike haplotypes and show that persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections drive divergent haplotype emergence, accelerating viral evolution an...

cell.com

FoldMason is out now in @science.org. It generates accurate multiple structure alignments for thousands of protein structures in seconds. Great work by Cameron L. M. Gilchrist and @milot.bsky.social. 📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/foldmason 💾 github.com/steineggerla...

Multiple protein structure alignment at scale with FoldMason

Protein structure is conserved beyond sequence, making multiple structural alignment (MSTA) essential for analyzing distantly related proteins. Computational prediction methods have vastly extended ou...

science.org

Let's try this #AcademicSky 1 fav, 1 funny, strange, or unexpected scientific anecdote about a paper, a scientist, a fact, hoping that some will be new to you.

Join the quest - especially historians of London science! 👇So far we have narrowed this down to some lab branded as "Mill Hill" in London E1 postcode in the 1960s (i.e. not actually in Mill Hill)

Helen Matthews@helenkmatthews.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Anyone know anything about Jennifer Harvey, who first isolated the virus containing HRAS (Harvey-Ras) at Mill Hill in 1967? Prepping a lecture including the discovery of Ras oncogenes and wanted to add pics of the scientists involved. The Internet has NOTHING #sciencehistory #forgottenwomen

Preparing for some introductory virology lecutures, which is of course a happy excuse for me to do some drawing again

My time in @martinsteinegger.bsky.social's group is ending, but I’m staying in Korea to build a lab at Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine. If you or someone you know is interested in molecular machine learning and open-source bioinformatics, please reach out. I am hiring! mirdita.org

Mirdita Lab - Laboratory for Computational Biology & Molecular Machine Learning

Mirdita Lab builds scalable bioinformatics methods.

mirdita.org