User:Jaime.Prilusky/Test/Sortable

Geobacter nanowire structure surprise.

F Wang, Y Gu, JP O'Brien, SM Yi, SE Yalcin, V Srikanth, C Shen, D Vu, NL Ing, AI Hochbaum, EH Egelman, NS Malvankar. Cell 2019 doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2019.03.029
Bacteria living in anaerobic environments (no oxygen) need alternative electron acceptors in order to get energy from their food. An acceptor abundant in the earth's crust is red iron oxide ("rust"), which gets reduced to black iron oxide (magnetite). Many bacteria, such as Geobacter, get their metabolic energy by transferring electrons to acceptors that are multiple cell diameters distant, using protein nanowires. These were long thought to be pili. But when the structure of the nanowires was solved in 2019, to everyone's surprise, they turned out to be unprecedented linear polymers of multi-heme cytochromes. The hemes form an electrically conductive chain in the cores of these nanowires.

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Opening a Gate to Human Health

by Alice Clark (PDBe)
In the 1970s, an exciting discovery of a family of medicines was made by the Japanese scientist Satoshi Ōmura. One of these molecules, ivermectin, is shown in this artwork bound in the ligand binding pocket of the Farnesoid X receptor, a protein which helps regulate cholesterol in humans. This structure showed that ivermectin induced transcriptional activity of FXR and could be used to regulate metabolism.

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Coronavirus Spike Protein Membrane Fusion

by Eric Martz
SARS-CoV-2 spike protein "spears" the host membrane with a fusion peptide and drags the virus envelope membrane transmembrane domain close to the host membrane, initiating fusion. This moves the virus RNA genome into the host cell, initiating infection.
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Polio is still here!
Polio vaccines have been available since the 1950s, but the challenges of vaccination in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan have prevented worldwide eradication. In 2022, polio was found circulating in parts of New York State, USA. The polio virus has a small RNA genome enclosed in an icosahedral capsid composed of several proteins, shown cut in half. The structures of virus capsids can be explored using free FirstGlance in Jmol.

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