CCR5 and Biological Complexity: The Need for Data Integration and Educational Materials to Address Genetic/Biological Reductionism at the Interface of Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications.

In the age of genomics, public understanding of complex scientific knowledge is critical. To combat reductionistic views, it is necessary to generate and organize educational material and data that keep pace with advances in genomics. The view that CCR5 is solely the receptor for HIV gave rise to demand to remove the gene in patients to create host HIV resistance, underestimating the broader roles and complex genetic inheritance of CCR5.

Genomic, transcriptomic, and protein landscape profile of CFTR and cystic fibrosis.

Cystic Fibrosis (CF) is caused most often by removal of amino acid 508 (Phe508del, deltaF508) within CFTR, yet dozens of additional CFTR variants are known to give rise to CF and many variants in the genome are known to contribute to CF pathology. To address CFTR coding variants, we developed a sequence-to-structure-to-dynamic matrix for all amino acids of CFTR using 233 vertebrate species, CFTR structure within a lipid membrane, and 20 ns of molecular dynamic simulation to assess known variants from the CFTR1, CFTR2, ClinVar, TOPmed, gnomAD, and COSMIC databases. Surprisingly, we identify 18 variants of uncertain significance within CFTR from diverse populations that are heritable and a likely cause of CF that have been understudied due to nonexistence in Caucasian populations.

Crystal structure of (1,1')-1,1'-(pyridine-2,6-di-yl)bis-[-(2,3,4,5,6-penta-fluoro-phen-yl)ethan-1-imine].

The title compound, CHFN, represents a potential redox non-innocent pyridine di-imine ligand system. It consists of a central pyridine ring with two penta-fluoro-phenyl substituted imine groups in positions 2 and 6. The whole mol-ecule is generated by mirror symmetry, the mirror bis-ecting the N and -C atom of the pyridine ring.