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Biology in news
Biology as it reaches the news: DNA, RNA and proteins, cells, evolution and fossils, animal behaviour, the brain, immunity and ageing. Prelims has asked how plant and animal cells differ and what B cells and T cells do in the body.
Showing 1 of 5 subjects, those that changed from 1 to 15 August 2026.Show all
Raygun and protein miniaturisation
Copy link to Raygun and protein miniaturisationPrelims and Mains
A protein chain folds into helices, sheets and loops, and it is that shape, not the length of the chain, that does the work. Raygun, an artificial intelligence system built on protein language models, works in the room this leaves: it resizes or rewrites a protein at a chosen length while keeping it working.
- Six of eight shrunken fluorescent proteins still glowed, surviving more than forty coordinated edits where four or five uncoordinated ones killed fluorescence.
- They glow only dimly, so the method needs refinement.
- Gene therapy is the use in view: viral shells carrying genes into cells have a size limit many genes exceed.
What changed
Also filed elsewhere
- Epigenetics · on Genomics, gene editing and cell therapy
A gene is a stretch of DNA whose sequence of bases spells out one protein, and Mendel's rules have each of its two copies passed on unchanged and independently.