Structures for the protein complexes of more than 2,800 viruses went into the AlphaFold Database this week, free for anyone, academic or commercial. The scale: roughly 1.7 to 1.8 million high-confidence complex predictions across about 2,812 viral proteomes. Around 30% of the protein interactions in it are new to science, not in the Protein Data Bank at all. Why complexes rather than single proteins matters. Joe Grove at Glasgow, part of the effort, put it simply: many viral proteins don't act alone, they work with partners. Viruses had been a blind spot in a database that already covers nearly every catalogued protein & has over three million users. The engineering: AlphaFold2 running on NVIDIA's BioNeMo Inference Runtime, which brought prediction down to minutes per structure at proteome scale. X-ray crystallography takes years & thousands of dollars per structure. The pipeline itself has been open-sourced. Target selection was guided by the UK Health Security Agency's priority pathogen tool, so it's weighted toward viral families known to infect humans. The necessary caveat & Nature ran it prominently: these are predictions, not experiments. They lack the sugar molecules coating many viral proteins - the ones that help viruses evade immune detection, & they'll need experimental confirmation before anyone builds on them. The timing isn't accidental either. It landed alongside a UN General Assembly session on pandemic preparedness. Still, the point stands. The useful version of preparedness is having the structural work already done before you need it, rather than starting the week a new virus arrives.

Historic Black cemeteries are being rediscovered beneath apartment complexes, parking lots, and highways across the country, and descendants are fighting to make sure their ancestors are not forgotten again. From Tampa to Bethesda to Atlanta, families are demanding the dignity and protection every final resting place deserves.

A 2025 #ScienceReview# looked at a different approach to drug discovery that may enable drugging of unconventional targets through stabilization of macromolecular complexes with molecules known as “LOCKTACs.” Learn more: #ScienceMagArchives#

A 2025 #ScienceReview# looked at a different approach to drug discovery that may enable drugging of unconventional targets through stabilization of macromolecular complexes with molecules known as “LOCKTACs.” Learn more: #ScienceMagArchives#

Billionaire Aliko Dangote is on track to meet the ambitious target of doubling the capacity of his mega-refinery in three years, creating one of the world’s biggest fuel complexes as a global supply shortage boosts profitability