Today is a BFD triumph in life science—solving the 3D structure at near atomic level resolution, one of the world's hardest, giant jigsaw puzzles—the nuclear pore complex—the largest molecular machine in human cells, with structure-based AI prediction @ScienceMagazine
In case you are not familiar with the nuclear pore complex, it is in every cell of your body (that has a nucleus), comprised of >1,000 proteins, and connects everything from cytoplasm to nucleus, bidirectionally nature.com/articles/d4158… by @ewencallaway@Nature
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BA.4/5 is on the rise to become dominant in the US and UK. It hit South Africa and Portugal first. Note the difference in impact for those 2 countries in deaths
US cases are still rising, 7% increase week-to-week, >146,000 confirmed yesterday, current 7-day avg 112,000+, only a small fraction of the actual infections.
Hospitalizations closing in on 30,000 charts.medriva.com/us
UK cases & hospitalizations are starting to increase again
American exceptionalism
The United States comprises 4% of the world's population
✓ 16% of the world's Covid confirmed deaths
✓ 40% of world's guns
✓ Only industrialized nation in the world with states making abortion illegal
It took only 10 months from sequencing #SARSCoV2 to validation of mRNA vaccines with 95% efficacy in large, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials
The "Delta" (L452R) mutation found in both the BA.2.12.1 and BA.4/BA.5 variants is key to both immune escape and enhanced cell fusion (not present in BA.1 or BA.2). And people with prior Delta infections have better neutralization to these variants biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
Interesting new @NEJM report by same group, @ShanLuLiu1 and team @OhioState,
for Deltacron's (no L452R mutation, recombinant Omicron w/ Delta) substantial immune evasion with no enhanced sensitivity to serum from Delta wave nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…