Niko McCarty

6 days ago | nmccarty.com | Niko McCarty

Interview with Manu Prakash. The measles vaccine has saved >90 million lives in the last 50 years. Best paper I’ve seen in the last two weeks; mapping hundreds of proteins that bind to the human genome, with single amino acid resolution. An ancient protein fold works in both mirror-image forms; it has no ‘handedness.’ It can bind to both L- and D- forms of double-stranded DNA. NIAID is scrapping funds for “two major consortia” developing HIV vaccines.

1 week ago | nmccarty.com | Niko McCarty

Arc Institute researchers recently published a preprint showing that their gene-editing technology, called Bridge recombinases, work in human cells. Many people applauded the paper on social media, while others asked, “Wait, how does this tool even work? And why does it matter?”Fair questions. The preprint is not easy to understand, and the reasonsfor inventing a new type of gene-editing tool in 2025 are even less obvious.

2 weeks ago | worksinprogress.news | Xander Balwit |Niko McCarty

You can now comment on our articles. We’re hosting a Stripe Press pop-up coffee shop and bookstore on Saturday, June 28, in Washington, DC. RSVP here if you can make it. In many ways, this horse is normal: it stands roughly 14 hands high, has dark eyes hooded by thick lashes, and makes a contented neighing sound when its coat is stroked. But its blood pulses with venom.

Feb 11, 2025 | blog.asimov.com | Niko McCarty

One reason David Goodsell’s paintings attract biologists, I think, is because they are unapologetically realistic. His paintings depict seas of macromolecules splayed out in pastel shades. A Goodsell painting looks nothing like the spacious diagrams one finds in high school biology textbooks, and that’s exactly why they linger in the mind: they show, visually, how crowded cells really are. But crowded with what, exactly? Well, an E.

Jan 28, 2025 | blog.asimov.com | Niko McCarty

A cell is a vibrating ball of energy — a chaotic sack of molecules. These molecules float around and collide with one another constantly. Every protein in a cell, for instance, collides with about 10 billion water molecules each second. Cells “work” despite this chaos. Most events within a cell only happen if the right things collide at the right time, and at sufficient frequencies. A DNA polymerase enzyme, for example, can only copy a genome if it first collides with the right part of DNA.