Background: Social media offers a popular, unfiltered source of patient and provider perspectives on health care. This study investigated the characteristics of social media posts referencing distal radius fracture (DRF).
Methods: Content was queried from Instagram from February 06, 2019, to December 08, 2021, using the hashtags "#distalradiusfracture" and "#wristfracture.
Peptide hormones and neuropeptides form a diverse class of bioactive secreted molecules that control essential processes in animals. Despite breakthroughs in peptide discovery, many signaling peptides remain undiscovered. Recently, we demonstrated the use of somatostatin-mimicking toxins from cone snails to identify the invertebrate ortholog of somatostatin.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVenomous animals hunt using bioactive peptides, but relatively little is known about venom small molecules and the resulting complex hunting behaviors. Here, we explored the specialized metabolites from the venom of the worm-hunting cone snail, Using the model polychaete worm , we demonstrate that venom contains small molecules that mimic natural polychaete mating pheromones, evoking the mating phenotype in worms. The specialized metabolites from different cone snails are species-specific and structurally diverse, suggesting that the cones may adopt many different prey-hunting strategies enabled by small molecules.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDisulfide-rich peptides are highly abundant in nature and their study has provided fascinating insight into protein folding, structure and function. Venomous cone snails belong to a group of organisms that express one of the largest sets of disulfide-rich peptides (conotoxins) found in nature. The diversity of structural scaffolds found for conotoxins suggests that specialized molecular adaptations have evolved to ensure their efficient folding and secretion.
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