Simone Alma Evans

simone-alma.bsky.social

07 May 2026 04:25

Excited to share our preprint on terminase sensing by Avs2 and Upx! We solved a cryo-EM structure of Avs2 with terminase and found an unexpected "bridging" ATP at their interface. In contrast, Upx is predicted to bind an unfolded ATPase domain via β-augmentation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Simone Alma Evans

simone-alma.bsky.social

07 May 2026 04:19

I am so excited to share our project with you! We find prokaryotic proteases activate toxic enzymes and pores as a modular strategy in phage defense. We studied four fascinating protease-toxin pairs that are abundant across bacterial genomes: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Alexey Amunts

amunts.bsky.social

20 April 2026 03:38

Pleasure to welcome Patrick Cramer to SMART and to present our research and discuss future directions. Cooperation between Max Planck Society @maxplanck.de and institutions in Shenzhen is expanding and will open new opportunities. As Patrick concluded in German, “Jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne”.

Alex Gao

algao.bsky.social

19 April 2026 23:53

Great summary by @philipcball.bsky.social! Our findings certainly don’t invalidate the central dogma, but rather demonstrate an unexpected (and cool!) structural mechanism by which a sequence-specific DNA is created in a cell. (1/6)

Alex Gao

algao.bsky.social

19 April 2026 23:53

As far as we know, enzymes that make DNA without a nucleic acid template produce sequences that are more or less random (the polyA homopolymer made by DRT9 is RNA-templated). As a result, … (2/6)