Cutting-edge plant natural product pathway elucidation.

Plant natural products (PNPs) play important roles in plant physiology and have been applied across diverse fields of human society. Understanding their biosynthetic pathways informs plant evolution and meanwhile enables sustainable production through metabolic engineering. However, the discovery of PNP biosynthetic pathways remains challenging due to the diversity of enzymes involved and limitations in traditional gene mining approaches.

Analysis of two cooperating antibodies unveils immune pressure imposed on HIV Env to elicit a V3-glycan supersite broadly neutralizing antibody lineage.

Elicitation of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) is a goal of vaccine design as a strategy for targeting highly divergent strains of HIV-1. Current HIV-1 vaccine design efforts seek to elicit bnAbs by first eliciting their precursors through prime-boost regimens. This requires an understanding of the co-evolution between viruses and antibodies.

A Structural Update of Neutralizing Epitopes on the HIV Envelope, a Moving Target.

Antibodies that can neutralize diverse HIV-1 strains develop in ~10-20% of HIV-1 infected individuals, and their elicitation is a goal of vaccine design. Such antibodies can also serve as therapeutics for those who have already been infected with the virus. Structural characterizations of broadly reactive antibodies in complex with the HIV-1 spike indicate that there are a limited number of sites of vulnerability on the spike.

Structural Analysis of Neutralizing Epitopes of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike to Guide Therapy and Vaccine Design Strategies.

Coronavirus research has gained tremendous attention because of the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (nCoV or SARS-CoV-2). In this review, we highlight recent studies that provide atomic-resolution structural details important for the development of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that can be used therapeutically and prophylactically and for vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. Structural studies with SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing mAbs have revealed a diverse set of binding modes on the spike's receptor-binding domain and N-terminal domain and highlight alternative targets on the spike.