Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

'Protecting and conserving habitats is central to saving species. This idea is captured in the framework being negotiated at COP15. The draft includes the goal of conserving at least 30% of the world’s land and sea by 2030. But for protections to be most effective, they must include regions that are rich in biodiversity, such as tropical forests, Pimm says. Despite an increase in protected areas worldwide over the past ten years, species numbers have still declined, because these safeguards were not in the right places, studies show.'

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04370-4

'En la ficha de la casa de subastas se especifica que la pieza, sin marco, es posterior al artista renacentista. Una serie de características que, a priori, parecen más disuasorias que atractivas. Pero, tras 11 días expuesta en la web de Christie´s, el último día se produjo una batalla entre unos pocos comerciantes. En minutos, las ofertas fueron escalando y el precio se disparó hasta más de un millón de euros. ¿Qué pasó? ¿Por qué una copia posterior a Leonardo da Vinci llegó hasta esa cantidad? Una vez más, como todo lo que rodea al pintor y a este cuadro, hay más misterios que certezas.'

https://elpais.com/cultura/2022-12-10/la-locura-del-mercado-del-arte-por-que-una-copia-de-leonardo-da-vinci-salta-de-15000-a-un-millon-de-euros.html

CARTs in Lupus

'The re-emergence of B cells in these patients is another thing we’ll have to figure out. That just doesn’t happen in the leukemia CAR-T patients, and one obvious explanation might be that the memory B cells involved are in different tissues - bone marrow in the leukemia patients and other lymphoid organs in lupus. But that remains to be proven, and we’re going to learn some interesting things while doing that.'

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/wonderful-progress-against-severe-lupus

'MC132 suppresses the immune system by targeting NF-κB, and it had no known homologs until now. The ERV homologs of MC132 in the human genome are mostly disrupted by mutations, but there is an intact copy on chromosome 4. We found homologs of MC132 in ERVs of apes, monkeys, and bushbaby, but not tarsiers, lemurs or non-primates. This suggests that some primate retroviruses had, or have, an extra immune-suppressing protein, which underwent horizontal genetic transfer between unrelated viruses.'
#Preprint #Virology #Evolution #horizontalgenetransfer

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.04.515135v2

I love footnotes. This one about "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" from Quentin Tarantino's 'Cinema Speculation' is straight out of a seminar on consciousness

@nic I've made a mental note to do the same later

@yoginho Especially if you use it after the Hulk.

"Here, we investigate fundamental virological traits that influence cross-species transmissibility and zoonotic propensity by interrogating a database of over 12,000 mammalian virus–host associations. Our analysis reveals that enveloped viruses tend to infect more host species and are more likely to be zoonotic than nonenveloped viruses, while other viral traits such as genome composition, structure, size, or the viral replication compartment play a less obvious role."

#Virology #Zoonosis #Spillover

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2215600119