Our time below the radar is soon officially coming to an end. And for those who want a sneak peak, our first manuscript is just uploaded to biorxiv!

In this manuscript, our postdoc Karim Rafie collaborated with Annasara Lenman and Niklas Arnberg to determine the first structure of an enteric adenovirus. Think adenoviruses cause respiratory and/or eye infections? Well, not only. This adenovirus causes gastrointestinal infections, and is especially common as a cause of diarrhoea in infants and children. As the second most common cause of death in children worldwide, diarrhoea is estimated to take around half a million children’s lives every year. So we think that this structure has the potential to make a real impact on an understudied cause of mortality in children. And for the structure nerds out there the manuscript also has a lot to offer, like the use of a multi-step structural bioinformatics approach to identify a 24-mer peptide chain as the likely anchoring point for the protein that ties the genome to the capsid.

This has been an incredibly rewarding and fun collaboration with the Arnberg lab and we will update everyone as soon as the manuscript is accepted for publication.