The sequel to our DRT2 story is here, and this one is once again full of surprises! This time around, the Sternberg Lab teamed up with the Wiedenheft Lab to study how DRT9 reverse transcriptases provide antiviral immunity. Here’s what we found: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

New enzymes can unlock chemistry we never had access to before. Here, we introduce RFdiffusion2 (RFD2), a generative model that makes significant strides in de novo enzyme design. Preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… Code: coming soon Animation credit: x.com/ichaydon (1/n)

UltraSelex for RNA-aptamer discovery is non-iterative and can combine biochemical partitioning, high-throughput sequencing, and computational signal-to-background rank modeling of hits in approximately one day. nature.com/articles/s4158…

This is a wild paper. The anaerobic biochemistry is definitely worth your while (and beyond me to explain), but let me try to explain why this is also an evolutionary bombshell. This is about how nitrogen fixation evolved as we know it.

Bacteria may have adapted to oxygen well before Earth’s atmosphere was saturated with it, according to a new study in Science. The findings underscore the dynamic relationship between biological evolution and Earth's geological history. scim.ag/41YipDC

(1/7) Most sequencing technologies struggle with repeat expansion disorders, devastating genetic conditions caused by long, unstable tandem repeats in DNA or RNA. These include ALS, myotonic dystrophy, and others. But why is sequencing them so hard? 🧵

New paper from my group rdcu.be/eoaRr "Trinucleotide substrates under pH–freeze–thaw cycles enable open-ended exponential RNA replication by a polymerase ribozyme" in Nature Chemistry — great collaboration with attwaterlab.uk.

Life is easier with triplets nature.com/articles/s4155…

New paper from the lab from @SriramGarg. We introduce a general substitution matrix for structural phylogenetics. I think this is a big deal, so read on below if you think deep history is important. academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-ar…