Noncoding RNA Therapies
I was mentioning the number of unusual therapeutic modes that are being explored these days, and one of those is (broadly) RNA-based approaches. The ones […]
Biological News
Viral Knots
The current pandemic has made everyone think a lot more about viruses than they ever had any desire to, but they’re a constant background to […]
The Mirror World
Now this is a paper that’ll make your head spin. It’s from the Zhu group at Tsinghua University, and the head-spinning will be both because […]
One Lost Methyl Group = Huge Amounts of Food Production
I don’t do a lot of posts on plant biochemistry here, but this news is pretty notable, and it illustrates several points that apply across […]
More Protein Folding Progress – What’s It Mean?
I last wrote about Deepmind’s efforts to predict protein folding and structure here, with their AlphaFold software. AlphaFold really performed very strongly in the 2020 […]
A Fifty-Year-Old Cancer Drug Doesn’t Do What You Think
5-fluorouracil (5-FU) has been around a long time now (over fifty years), and it’s a standard oncology drug (particularly in colorectal treatment regimes). But try […]
Why Are Women and Men So Different in Autoimmune Disease?
That last post on vaccine reactions mentioned autotimmune disease several times, and that brings up a question that’s been outstanding for many decades now. If […]
What mRNA is Good For, And What It Maybe Isn’t
The huge success of the mRNA vaccination platform during the pandemic has set a lot of people to thinking about what comes next. Moderna and […]
Med-Chem Should Be Larger Than It Is
I’m really glad to see this Perspective article in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, not least because it hits on a theme that I emphasize […]
Clearing Cellular Dead Wood
For many years now, the topic of “senescent cells” has been the subject of plenty of research work. Back in the 1960s the “Hayflick limit” […]
CRISPR Editing in Primates
There’s some really interesting CRISPR news out today, and it’s likely to be a forerunner of much more news to come. A research team has […]
Integration Into the Human Genome?
I’ve had several requests for comment on this recent PNAS paper, which talks about integration of SARS-CoV-2 sequences into the DNA of human cells. I’m […]
Mysteries in Human RNA
Let’s put this one in the category of “more things that we didn’t know about human biology”. We’ve known for some time now about ribozymes […]
