Joe Grove

‘An AlphaFold 4’ – scientists marvel at DeepMind drug spin-off’s exclusive new AI Isomorphic Lab’s proprietary drug-discovery model is a major advance, but scientists developing open-source tools are left guessing how to achieve similar results.

“It’s a major advance, on the scale of an AlphaFold4. The problem, of course, is that we know nothing of the details.”

Isomorphic Lab’s proprietary drug-discovery model is a major advance
go.nature.com/3Mm2ZnQ

Exploring ICTV virus metadata just got easier on ViralZone — interactive table, instant CSV export, and full search. The new species names are displayed alongside virus names and acronyms.

viralzone.expasy.org/resources/VM...

(source: ictv.global/vmr)

Excruciating tropical disease can now be transmitted in most of Europe, study finds ‘Shocking’ data shows the climate crisis and invasive mosquitos mean chikungunya could spread in 29 countries

Chikungunya is on the march in Europe
www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

​A huge thank you to the team at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research (CVR) @cvrinfo.bsky.social: @ulad-litvin.bsky.social, @bljog.bsky.social, @spyroslytras.bsky.social, Alexander Jack, and @davidlrobertson.bsky.social.

It is almost five years since I first applied AlphaFold to a handful of viral proteins.

Today, hundreds of thousands of predictions and many discoveries later, we are delighted to announce the integration of our Viro3D dataset into the @ebi.embl.org and Google DeepMind AlphaFold Database.

Very excited to share our work, a fish herpesvirus' cryo EM structure. It features a long PVAT tail, with new and host-like proteins discovered using modelAngelo, Dali, and Viro3D, including a host-like macrodomain
doi.org/10.64898/202...
@dbhella.bsky.social @grovearmada.bsky.social

Cryo-EM of a Divergent Herpesvirus Reveals Structural Conservation and Novelty Including a Portal-Vertex Tegument Protein with Multiple Macrodomain-like Folds www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.13.705735v1 #cryoEM

A near-complete map of human cytosolic degrons and their relevance for disease

We measured degron potency of >200,000 30-residue tiles from >5,000 human proteins, and trained a model to predict degrons from sequence

Led by @vvouts.bsky.social in @rhp-lab.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Antibody escape drives emergence of diverse spike haplotypes resembling variants of concern in persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections Snell et al. develop sequencing methodology to identify full-length spike haplotypes and show that persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections drive divergent haplotype emergence, accelerating viral evolution an...

This is finally out.

Very short take home. All the variation in spike that produced the immune escape characteristics of Omicron can occur in one single persistently infected individual over the period of a year.

This is why persistent infections matter

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Multiple protein structure alignment at scale with FoldMason Protein structure is conserved beyond sequence, making multiple structural alignment (MSTA) essential for analyzing distantly related proteins. Computational prediction methods have vastly extended ou...

FoldMason is out now in @science.org. It generates accurate multiple structure alignments for thousands of protein structures in seconds. Great work by Cameron L. M. Gilchrist and @milot.bsky.social.
📄 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
🌐 search.foldseek.com/foldmason
💾 github.com/steineggerla...

Let's try this #AcademicSky

1 fav, 1 funny, strange, or unexpected scientific anecdote about a paper, a scientist, a fact, hoping that some will be new to you.

Join the quest - especially historians of London science! 👇So far we have narrowed this down to some lab branded as "Mill Hill" in London E1 postcode in the 1960s (i.e. not actually in Mill Hill)

A pen and ink drawing showing a sphere (labelled 'What is the simplest symmetrical way to build a box around this genome') and the same sphere enclosed in the 5 Platonic solids

Preparing for some introductory virology lecutures, which is of course a happy excuse for me to do some drawing again

Mirdita Lab - Laboratory for Computational Biology & Molecular Machine Learning Mirdita Lab builds scalable bioinformatics methods.

My time in @martinsteinegger.bsky.social's group is ending, but I’m staying in Korea to build a lab at Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine. If you or someone you know is interested in molecular machine learning and open-source bioinformatics, please reach out. I am hiring!
mirdita.org

🚨vConTACT3 now in Nature Biotechnology:
- >95% agreement with ICTV for known viruses
- Classifies both prokaryotic and eukaryotic viruses
- Extends beyond genus → subfamily, family & order
- Systematically assigns taxonomy to tens of thousands of previously unclassified viruses

A poster reading Influenza Update Meeting, with conference delegates behind

Really enjoyed day one of the 2025 @influenzaupdate.bsky.social Meeting - looking forward to more flu talks and discussion tomorrow!

A poster with branding for the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre fo Virus Research, labelled 'Virus Snowflakes.' The poster shows snowflake-like virus designs and song lyrics reading: On the twelfth day of Christmas, a virus gave to me, Twelve fights worth winning, Eleven Christmas dinners, Ten lunar landers, Nine childhood vaccines, Eight tools for teaching, Seven dogs a-barking, Six wasps a-laying, FIIIIVE TIIINY RIIIIIIINGS, Four vaccine platforms, Three genome segments, Two twinned capsids, and A world that is too small to see

Feeling festive?
Why not deck the halls with @cvrinfo.bsky.social's papercraft #VirusSnowflakes and celebrate the science of viruses and the fight against viral diseases.
Download for free: cvr-engagement.co.uk/virus-snowfl...
#scicomm #sciart #decorations

GLUE: A Flexible Software System for Virus Genomics A General Solution to the Repeated Problems of Virus Genomics

Most viral workflows are fragile pipelines.

GLUE turns them into structured, shareable projects: curated sequences, alignments, features, phylogenies, metadata & scripts all in one reproducible environment.

gluetools.substack.com/p/glue-a-fle...

Avian-origin influenza A viruses tolerate elevated pyrexic temperatures in mammals Host body temperature can define a virus’s replicative profile—influenza A viruses (IAVs) adapted to 40° to 42°C in birds are less temperature sensitive in vitro compared with human isolates adapted t...

How does fever work?

Our new Science paper shows how elevated body temperature can protect against severe influenza and that avian-origin viruses escape this defence.

This is likely one reason why bird flus and some pandemic influenzas can be so severe.🧵

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A flurry of snowflakes with text reading 'Virus Snowflakes: a collection of paper art viruses by Ed Hutchinson - Download now!' along with the logo of the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research

If you'd like to celebrate the biology of viruses - or the fight against viral diseases - this winter, try out our free and updated #VirusSnowflake designs.
Please share, and if you have any photos of Virus Snowflakes in your area it would be lovely to see them!
cvr-engagement.co.uk/virus-snowfl...

Taxonomic expansion and reorganization of Flaviviridae - Nature Microbiology Analysis of RNA polymerase hallmark gene phylogenies supported by protein structure relationships of flaviviruses and ‘flavi-like’ viruses underpins the taxonomic expansion and reorganization of Flavi...

🧬 Thrilled to share our latest paper in @natmicrobiol.nature.com 📄

A collaboration to give the Flaviviridae (home to Zika, Dengue & HCV) a much-needed taxonomic re-think.

Our at-scale AI structure prediction gave a complementary perspective on viral evolution.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

National flu and COVID-19 surveillance report: 30 October 2025 (week 44)

Always fun when the word "unusually" turns up in a UKHSA doc: "influenza activity increased, particularly among children, and is now above baseline. This is an unusually early start of the influenza season." www.gov.uk/government/s...

Announcement of the “Expert insights” online seminar series by the ACHIEVE Academy. Talk by Dr. Timothy Soh from the Leibniz Institute of Virology on “AlphaFold & HerpesFolds.” Date: Tuesday, October 7, 2025, at 2:00 PM. The series takes place every first Tuesday of the month.

🔬 Upcoming Expert Insights Seminar by ACHIEVE
Join us on October 7th, 2025, at 2:00 PM (CET) for an inspiring talk on “AlphaFold & HerpesFolds” by Dr. Timothy Soh. Register here to join via Zoom: achieve.g-f-v.org/seminar-seri...

Huge congratulations to Emma Davis, the winner of 2025's Early Career Microbiologist of the Year prize! We agree with Emma that all of the finalists' talks were brilliant and a massive well done to everyone involved!

I only just managed it 6 months ago...

The Viral AlphaFold Database of monomers and homodimers reveals conserved protein folds in viruses of bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes VAD is a Viral AlphaFold Database of protein monomers and homodimers from viruses infecting hosts across the tree of life.

Viral AlphaFold Database (VAD) is live in Science Advances

~27,000 predicted viral protein monomers & homodimers

Conserved folds across bacteria, archaea & eukaryotic viruses

New toxin–antitoxin system KreTA uncovered

Vast “functional darkness” remains uncharted

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A miniature CRISPR–Cas10 enzyme confers immunity by inhibitory signalling - Nature Panoptes, an anti-phage defence system against virus-mediated immune suppression, is revealed.

Now online at @nature.com we show how the Panoptes defense system protects against viruses that attempt immune evasion - and expands our understanding of the role of oligonucleotides in immunity.

Check out this work co-led with @benadler.bsky.social here:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A modified cyclosporine enhances lentivector transduction ex vivo and in vivo by degrading IFITM3 Intrinsic innate immune barriers have evolved to suppress viral infection and can reduce effective gene delivery in gene therapy. We have developed BG147, a novel cyclosporine A analogue, optimised vi...

New preprint from our lab, led by our postdocs Dara Annett and Kate Morling in collaboration with Selwood Lab!

We developed a modified cyclosporine, BG147, which enhances lentivector gene therapy transduction, ex vivo in HSPC and in vivo in mouse photoreceptors, by degrading IFITM3. Check it out!

A plastic sign with a logogram of two people in conversation alongisde text that reads "There are no lone geniuses"

Our new "There are no lone geniuses" sign mounted on the door to the lab.

I made a sign for the lab with our informal lab motto, inspired by this convo between @itaiyanai.bsky.social and Martin Lercher: nightscience.buzzsprout.com/1744020/epis.... A good reminder that talking is among the best forms of thinking!

These 99 'lab hacks' will make your scientific work easier Nature asked contributors, editors and working researchers to share their best advice for scientists.

Over the last year, Nature’s Careers team has been tapping into its global community of readers, writers, friends and colleagues to compile a list of laboratory hacks to help make scientists’ working lives easier. Here’s a list of 99 of those hacks. #Academicsky 🧪