Analysing and meta-analysing time-series data of microbial growth and gene expression from plate readers.

Responding to change is a fundamental property of life, making time-series data invaluable in biology. For microbes, plate readers are a popular, convenient means to measure growth and also gene expression using fluorescent reporters. Nevertheless, the difficulties of analysing the resulting data can be a bottleneck, particularly when combining measurements from different wells and plates.

Multiple nutrient transporters enable cells to mitigate a rate-affinity tradeoff.

Eukaryotic genomes often encode multiple transporters for the same nutrient. For example, budding yeast has 17 hexose transporters (HXTs), all of which potentially transport glucose. Using mathematical modelling, we show that transporters that use either facilitated diffusion or symport can have a rate-affinity tradeoff, where an increase in the maximal rate of transport decreases the transporter's apparent affinity.

SARS-CoV-2 mutations in MHC-I-restricted epitopes evade CD8 T cell responses.

CD8 T cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has been implicated in COVID-19 severity and virus control. Here, we identified nonsynonymous mutations in MHC-I-restricted CD8 T cell epitopes after deep sequencing of 747 SARS-CoV-2 virus isolates. Mutant peptides exhibited diminished or abrogated MHC-I binding in a cell-free in vitro assay.