The authors have issued a response:
-not a new virus, described in 2020 and again in 2022
-doesn't infect human cells very well, nor cause disease in hamsters or regular (BALB/c) lab mice
-hACE2 mice express receptor in brain, probably causing deaths
sciencecast.org/casts/b8ue1qc4…

Enormously excited to share the Nature article written about our recent work with the giant proteins! nature.com/articles/d4158…

Parts of this >85K large bacterial protein were only annotatable by structural comparison. Here West-Roberts et al. used ColabFold/AlphaFold2 to predict and Foldseek to search structures. Read more about this protein in Ewen Callaway news article.
Preprint biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Dear Chloe Smith, when you visited the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology last May, were any of my ideas of trying to understand #Alzheimers disease too woke for your party? Have you read the book below?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Fasci…

Great story about the Botswana researcher who helped discovered what is now the dominant covid variant in the world buff.ly/3PUX6gn

Questions remain about whether AlphaFold, the AI tool for predicting protein structures, can really shake up the pharmaceutical industry go.nature.com/3Zxqnk4

Interesting excuse... 🤔 hopefully this is not the start of closed source software in the field...

'As part of our commitment to releasing our research breakthroughs safely and responsibly, we will not be sharing model weights, to prevent use in potentially unsafe applications.'

My piece on Google DeepMind's new tool for predicting disease-causing mutations - a crowded field where AI is already making big gains.

'It’s the best predictor we have right now. Will it be in two or three years? There’s a good chance it won’t.'

nature.com/articles/d4158…

Ian Wilmut has died, aged 79, according to The University of Edinburgh
I was lucky enough to speak with him at length for an oral history of Dolly. nature.com/articles/53460…

I don't have words to express how happy and satisfied I'm by seeing this out. Enormous congrats and recognition to m@rcii# Marcela Sandoval-Velasco for her tenacity leading this project!!! 🎉🪅🥳🪩🍾

Something big is going up at Memorial Stadium. I guess planning permission granted, then? Cllr Emma Edwards Tristan Cork Post Alex Seabrook❗️

The controversy over the Homo naledi intentional burial and engravings papers is stress-testing the new @elife peer review model.

My latest for nature

With thanks to Lee R Berger George (PJ) Perry María Martinón-Torres John Hawks Jamie Hodgkins & Sven Ouzman
nature.com/articles/d4158…

Seven generations of a prehistoric family mapped with ancient DNA go.nature.com/3KgoXEa

On the Homo naledi papers & eLife - the journal reviews:

Mahya Fazel-Zarandi & Julian Hartman updated their story following publication of the reviews: dailyprincetonian.com/article/2023/0…

And Ewen Callaway wrote this piece highlighting the reviews/ featuring several reviewers: nature.com/articles/d4158…

Good models

'Sharp criticism of controversial ancient-human claims tests eLife - the journal 's revamped peer-review model' by Ewen Callaway in @nature
nature.com/articles/d4158…

Ewen Callaway piece on the genetics of study participation in @nature

nature.com/articles/d4158…

Haven't tweeted in months, but couldn't help sharing my stories on some of the very oldest and newest proteins. Back to mostly listening/trying to ignore shouting about LLMs and lab leaks. nature.com/articles/d4158… nature.com/articles/d4158…