Dominik Hrebik

John Briggs @BriggsGroup · Feb 28, 2025

Mature #HIV-1 contains >2000 copies of “spacer peptide 2”, but we didn’t know why. We now see that SP2 binds the matrix protein and triggers the change into its mature arrangement. Summary video from @MargotRiggi :

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Niko McCarty. Verified account @NikoMcCarty · Dec 20, 2024

In 1850, many biologists believed that sperm carried fully-formed people inside, and that the egg merely acted as a vessel to grow them.

I didn't know this until recently, but Gregor Mendel was the first to provide numerical evidence debunking this idea. More in my daily blog.🔻

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CEITEC @CEITEC_Brno · Nov 13, 2024

@PlevkaLab has discovered a mechanism by which enteroviruses from the family Picornaviridae enter cells. Understanding how enteroviruses invade cells opens up opportunities for developing drugs blocking the infection 💊
Read more – link below ⬇️

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Niko McCarty. Verified account @NikoMcCarty · Oct 28, 2024

I think Gregor Mendel is highly underrated, even today.

Students often learn about his pea breeding experiments, but snippets from his letters suggest that he was also sitting on many other important experimental results when he died.

Unfortunately, thousands of his papers were burned by the other Augistinian friars. We know this because Mendel's nephew, Ferdinand Schindler, wrote a letter to Mendel's first biographer in 1905 (in his non-native language), telling him that:

"The died abbot Mendel was a man of liberal principles…He readed with the greatest interest Darwin’s works in the German translation and admired his genius, though he did not agree to all principles of this immortal natural philosopher. But it can be, that my uncle in the latter part of his life, retired from scientical evolutionary questions, because he had many clerical enemies. He said often to us nephews, that we shall find at his heritage, papers for publication, that he could not publish during his life. But we did not receive anything from the cloister, not even a thing for remembrance."

I'm working on a (long) essay about Mendel, which I'm hoping to publish soon.

(This is an actual photo of the monks; Mendel is second from top right.)

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