Publications by authors named "H A Lewin"
The abyssomicins are a structurally intriguing family of bioactive natural products that include compounds with potent antibacterial, antitumour and antiviral activities. The biosynthesis of the characteristic abyssomicin spirotetronate core occurs an enzyme-catalysed intramolecular Diels-Alder reaction, which proceeds one of two distinct stereochemical pathways to generate products differing in configuration at the C15 spirocentre. Using the purified spirotetronate cyclases AbyU (from abyssomicin C/atrop-abyssomicin C biosynthesis) and AbmU (from abyssomicin 2/neoabyssomicin biosynthesis), in combination with synthetic substrate analogues, here we show that stereoselectivity in the spirotetronate-forming [4 + 2]-cycloaddition is controlled by a combination of factors attributable to both the enzyme and substrate.
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- The study investigates the genetic and brain features linked to vocal learning in mammals by comparing data from the Egyptian fruit bat and 215 other placental mammals.* -
- Researchers found that certain proteins evolve more slowly in vocal learners and identified a specific brain region responsible for vocal motor control in the Egyptian fruit bat.* -
- Using machine learning, they uncovered 50 regulatory elements that are associated with vocal learning, suggesting that losses in these elements played a role in the evolution of vocal learning in mammals.*
A comprehensive characterization of regulatory elements in the chicken genome across tissues will have substantial impacts on both fundamental and applied research. Here, we systematically identified and characterized regulatory elements in the chicken genome by integrating 377 genome-wide sequencing datasets from 23 adult tissues. In total, we annotated 1.
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- Zoonomia is the largest resource for studying mammalian genomes, analyzing 240 species to find genetic mutations that could impact fitness and disease risk.
- Around 332 million bases in the human genome are highly conserved across species, indicating evolutionary significance, with 4552 of these being ultraconserved.
- The research highlights that most constrained bases are outside protein-coding regions and not annotated, revealing potential insights for understanding unique traits in mammals and informing medical research.
The precise pattern and timing of speciation events that gave rise to all living placental mammals remain controversial. We provide a comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of genetic variation across an alignment of 241 placental mammal genome assemblies, addressing prior concerns regarding limited genomic sampling across species. We compared neutral genome-wide phylogenomic signals using concatenation and coalescent-based approaches, interrogated phylogenetic variation across chromosomes, and analyzed extensive catalogs of structural variants.
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