Widespread exposure to SARS-CoV-2 in wildlife communities.

Pervasive SARS-CoV-2 infections in humans have led to multiple transmission events to animals. While SARS-CoV-2 has a potential broad wildlife host range, most documented infections have been in captive animals and a single wildlife species, the white-tailed deer. The full extent of SARS-CoV-2 exposure among wildlife communities and the factors that influence wildlife transmission risk remain unknown.

Impact of Electronic Polarization on Preformed, β-Strand Rich Homogenous and Heterogenous Amyloid Oligomers.

Amyloids are a subset of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) that self-assemble into cross-β oligomers and fibrils. The structural plasticity of amyloids leads to sampling of metastable, low-molecular-weight oligomers that contribute to cytotoxicity. Of interest are amyloid-β (Aβ) and islet amyloid polypeptide (IAPP), which are involved in the pathology of Alzheimer's disease and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, respectively.

Biophysical insights into OR2T7: Investigation of a potential prognostic marker for glioblastoma.

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most aggressive and prevalent form of brain cancer, with an expected survival of 12-15 months following diagnosis. GBM affects the glial cells of the central nervous system, which impairs regular brain function including memory, hearing, and vision. GBM has virtually no long-term survival even with treatment, requiring novel strategies to understand disease progression.

A selective sweep in the Spike gene has driven SARS-CoV-2 human adaptation.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic underscores the need to better understand animal-to-human transmission of coronaviruses and adaptive evolution within new hosts. We scanned more than 182,000 severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) genomes for selective sweep signatures and found a distinct footprint of positive selection located around a non-synonymous change (A1114G; T372A) within the spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD), predicted to remove glycosylation and increase binding to human ACE2 (hACE2), the cellular receptor. This change is present in all human SARS-CoV-2 sequences but not in closely related viruses from bats and pangolins.

NMR Model of the Entire Membrane-Interacting Region of the HIV-1 Fusion Protein and Its Perturbation of Membrane Morphology.

HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein (Env) is a transmembrane protein that mediates membrane fusion and viral entry. The membrane-interacting regions of the Env, including the membrane-proximal external region (MPER), the transmembrane domain (TMD), and the cytoplasmic tail (CT), not only are essential for fusion and Env incorporation but also can strongly influence the antigenicity of the Env. Previous studies have incrementally revealed the structures of the MPER, the TMD, and the KS-LLP2 regions of the CT.

Protein kinases in Toxoplasma gondii.

Toxoplasma gondii is an obligatory intracellular pathogen that causes life threatening illness in immunodeficient individuals, miscarriage in pregnant woman, and blindness in newborn children. Similar to any other eukaryotic cell, protein kinases play critical and essential roles in the Toxoplasma life cycle. Accordingly, many studies have focused on identifying and defining the mechanism of function of these signalling proteins with a long-term goal to develop anti-Toxoplasma therapeutics.