What About Nights, Weekends, and Wait Times? Adding an On-Demand Facilitated Telemedicine Buprenorphine Component to a Community-Based Peer Support Outreach Program.

Background: In 2020, loosened federal regulations allowed for buprenorphine for opioid use disorder to be initiated via telemedicine. In response to these regulatory changes and growing racial inequities in overdose in St. Louis, MO, a local, peer-led outreach program incorporated a new rapid access (RA) to buprenorphine program.

Primitive purine biosynthesis connects ancient geochemistry to modern metabolism.

An unresolved question in the origin and evolution of life is whether a continuous path from geochemical precursors to the majority of molecules in the biosphere can be reconstructed from modern-day biochemistry. Here we identified a feasible path by simulating the evolution of biosphere-scale metabolism, using only known biochemical reactions and models of primitive coenzymes. We find that purine synthesis constitutes a bottleneck for metabolic expansion, which can be alleviated by non-autocatalytic phosphoryl coupling agents.

Computational modeling and evolutionary implications of biochemical reactions in bacterial microcompartments.

Bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) are protein-encapsulated compartments found across at least 23 bacterial phyla. BMCs contain a variety of metabolic processes that share the commonality of toxic or volatile intermediates, oxygen-sensitive enzymes and cofactors, or increased substrate concentration for magnified reaction rates. These compartmentalized reactions have been computationally modeled to explore the encapsulated dynamics, ask evolutionary-based questions, and develop a more systematic understanding required for the engineering of novel BMCs.

Stress Responses across the Scales of Life: Toward a Universal Theory of Biological Stress.

Although biological systems are more complex and can actively respond to their environment, an effective entry point to the development of a universal theory of biological stress is the physical concepts of stress and strain. If you apply stress to the end of a beam of steel, the strain will accumulate within that steel beam. If the stress is weak then the strain will disappear when the force is removed and the beam will return to its original state of form and functionality.

Structure and contingency determine mutational hotspots for flower color evolution.

Evolutionary genetic studies have uncovered abundant evidence for genomic hotspots of phenotypic evolution, as well as biased patterns of mutations at those loci. However, the theoretical basis for this concentration of particular types of mutations at particular loci remains largely unexplored. In addition, historical contingency is known to play a major role in evolutionary trajectories, but has not been reconciled with the existence of such hotspots.