Kinetics and Optimality of Influenza A Virus Locomotion.

Influenza A viruses (IAVs) must navigate through a dense extracellular mucus to infect airway epithelial cells. The mucous layer, composed of glycosylated biopolymers (mucins), presents sialic acid that binds to ligands on the viral envelope and can be irreversibly cleaved by viral enzymes. It was recently discovered that filamentous IAVs exhibit directed persistent motion along their long axis on sialic acid-coated surfaces.

TITLE: Patient Preferences for Carpal Tunnel Release Education: A Comparison of Education Materials from Popular Healthcare Websites and ChatGPT.

Introduction: ChatGPT has been increasingly utilized to create, simplify, and revise hand surgery patient education materials. While significant research has examined the quality and readability of ChatGPT-derived hand surgery patient education, the patient perspective has not previously been evaluated. This study compared patient reported clarity and readability grades as well as patient preferences for carpal tunnel surgery educational information from medical education websites and ChatGPT.

Cell surface crowding is a tunable biophysical barrier to cell-cell fusion.

Cell-cell fusion is fundamental to developmental processes such as muscle formation, as well as to viral infections that cause pathological syncytia. An essential step in fusion is close membrane apposition, but cell membranes are crowded with proteins, glycoproteins, and glycolipids, all of which must be cleared before a fusion pore can be nucleated. Here, we find that cell surface crowding drastically reduces fusogenicity in multiple systems, independent of the method for driving fusion.

Target cell tension regulates macrophage trogocytosis.

Macrophages are known to engulf small membrane fragments, or trogocytose, target cells and pathogens, rather than fully phagocytose them. However, little is known about what causes macrophages to choose trogocytosis versus phagocytosis. Here, we report that cortical tension of target cells is a key regulator of macrophage trogocytosis.