The entire University Community is invited to the launch of the Structural & Chemical Biology Laboratory (SCBL) on Thursday, 5th February, 2025, at the Department of Chemistry. The Structural & Chemical Biology Laboratory is an affiliate lab of @WACCBIP_UG.

Join me in supporting Baylor College of Medicine's first-ever giving day! #GiveBIGDay support.bcm.edu/give-big-day…

nature.com/articles/s41467-0… Proud to share our work showing XPR1 is a phosphate-permeable channel with strong phosphate- and voltage-dependence. The backstory is wild too—Direct message me if you're curious! #science #ionchannels #XPR1 #BCM

Science and writing, thinking and rethinking

Our recent research from Prasad's lab reveals that human norovirus RdRp forms liquid-liquid phase condensates to drive replication in infected cells. #virology #phaseseparation @ScienceAdvances @EstesLab_BCM @anish12741503 @vijayalaks14983 @bcmhouston science.org/doi/10.1126/scia…

Drs. V Prasad, S Kaundal, @EstesLab_BCM et al have discovered replication hubs for #human #norovirus. @ScienceAdvances @bcmhouston #biomolecularCondensates #enteroids #PositiveRNAvirus @bcm_gihep @BCMCancerCenter @CPRITTexas bcm.edu/news/researchers-dis…

📢 Make your work FASTER and EASIER! Use AlphaBridge to analyze your AlphaFold results and receive a clear, easy-to-understand output—even for non-experts. ➡️ Let AlphaBridge help you accelerate your work! 🌐Try it: alpha-bridge.eu/ 👀Read more: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

The #CZImagingInstitute Kaggle Challenge is now open worldwide! Help accelerate biomedical discovery by developing #ML algorithms to automate the detection of biological objects in 3D images of cells captured by #CryoET czi.co/3Zdex04

Birth of protein folds and functions in the virome | Nature nature.com/articles/s41586-0…

Excited to share that the AlphaFold 3 model code and weights are now available for academic use. Looking forward to seeing what new research this unlocks and how the research community builds on AlphaFold 3 for scientific discoveries github.com/google-deepmind/a… 1/2

Faculty position in RNA Biology available in our center @bcmhouston. Application deadline is November 30. nature.com/naturecareers/job…

TED: The Encyclopedia of Domains now published in @ScienceMagazine discovering and annotating 314 MILLION protein domains in the AlphaFold database. joint work of @CATH_Gene3D and @psipred here at UCL.

Muscle-3D: scalable multiple protein structure alignment 1. Muscle-3D introduces a new approach to scalable multiple structure alignment (MStA), combining sequence representation and alignment techniques from Muscle5, capable of scaling to thousands of protein structures. 2. Unlike traditional sequence-based alignment, Muscle-3D uses structural context to enhance alignment quality, making it effective even for distantly related proteins with weak or undetectable sequence similarity. 3. A novel feature of Muscle-3D is the Reseek “mega-alphabet,” a rich structural representation that captures context beyond simple amino acid sequences. 4. Muscle-3D uses advanced techniques such as posterior decoding pair-HMM, consistency transformations, iterative refinement, and ensemble construction to improve alignment accuracy. 5. Comparative validation on multiple benchmark datasets shows that Muscle-3D scores highly, but metric disagreements highlight the inherently fuzzy nature of structural alignment. 6. A novel measure of local conformation similarity, LDDT-muw, is introduced to better quantify local structural conservation, providing a more balanced assessment of alignments. 7. Muscle-3D is highly scalable, with results demonstrating that it can align thousands of structures, which is challenging for most existing methods. 8. Muscle-3D provides contact map profiles, enabling visualization of inter-residue distance variation, which can be used to identify regions of evolutionary constraint. 9. The authors argue that due to the fuzzy nature of MStA, a universal standard for MStA accuracy is not possible, as different metrics lead to conflicting rankings. 10. Muscle-3D integrates seamlessly with visualization tools like Jalview and Pymol, enhancing user experience for analyzing alignments and structural similarity. 💻Code: github.com/rcedgar/muscle 📜Paper: biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/… #ProteinAlignment #Bioinformatics #StructuralBiology #Muscle3D #AI #ProteinDesign #OpenScience

This is great! @NIAIDNews have launched a collection of public domain illustrations (currently 550 individual icons) bioart.niaid.nih.gov/

🚨 Great alternatives to BioRender are now available!! 📢 @NIAIDNews offers a collection of public figures and icons for everyone to use. Check it out at bioart.niaid.nih.gov

We’re presenting AlphaProteo: an AI system for designing novel proteins that bind more successfully to target molecules. 🧬 It could help scientists better understand how biological systems function, save time in research, advance drug design and more. 🧵 dpmd.ai/3XuMqbX

De novo protein design is great, but nature has millions of proteins- why not repurpose them? Introducing Raygun, a new approach to protein design. It allows you to miniaturize, magnify or modify any protein. We synthesized miniaturized variants of eGFP and mCherry! 1/

Diffdock & ESMFold are now 6x & 7x faster! With 310 Copilot + Nvidia NIMs Try it for free here 310.ai/copilot/

I am looking for a PhD student to work on structure-based design of RNA ligands. This is great opportunity to combine working on a challenging research project with enjoying the outstanding natural beauty of Norway. #PhDposition #RNA #SBDD #Norway jobbnorge.no/en/available-jo…

Super excited to be releasing AlphaFold 3 today, developed by @IsomorphicLabs and @GoogleDeepMind: our next generation AI model for predicting the biomolecular structures and interactions of proteins, DNA, RNA, small molecules, and more: bit.ly/44yfaCw 1/