A team of scientists from the Laboratory of molecular bioengineering IBCh RAS together with the colleagues from other Russian Institutes bioinformatically predicted and recombinantly produced several different depolymerases encoded in the prophage regions of Acinetobacter baumannii genomes. For two depolymerases, the specificity to capsular polysaccharides (CPSs) of A. baumannii belonging to K1 and K92 capsular types (K types) was determined. These enzymes can be considered as suitable candidates for the development of new antibacterials against corresponding A. baumannii K types. 

A team of scientists from the Laboratory of molecular bioengineering IBCh RAS analysed 112 contractile phage tail sheath proteins (TShP) representing different groups of bacteriophages and archaeal viruses with myoviral morphology have been modelled with the novel machine learning software, AlphaFold 2. The common core domain of all studied sheath proteins, including viral and T6SS proteins, comprised both N-terminal and C-terminal parts, whereas the other parts consisted of one or several moderately conserved domains, presumably added during phage evolution.

Understanding the relationship between genotype and phenotype, the fitness landscape, elucidates the fundamental laws of heredity (Canale et al. 2018) and may ultimately create novel methods of protein design (Alley et al. 2019). The fitness landscape is often conceptualised as a multidimensional surface (Kondrashov and Kondrashov, 2015) with one dimension representing fitness, or another phenotype, and the other dimensions each representing a genotype’s locus.

The team of scientists from the Department of biotechnology and the Laboratory of structural biology of ion channels IBCh RAS synthesized a series of adenosine analogs as purine ribonucleosides bearing amino acid amides at the C6 position of 2-chloropurine.

In a new study, researchers from the Laboratory of molecular bases of embryogenesis, Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, demonstrated the versatility of the previously discovered mechanism of maternal genes mRNA destabilization caused by an interaction between the cytoskeletal protein Zyxin and the mRNA-binding factor Ybx1, showing that the same mechanism governs the retinoic acid signaling pathway during early embryonic development.

An outstanding scientist, director of the IBCh RAS, winner of many awards, professor, academician Vadim Tikhonovich Ivanov has passed away on Friday, 8 April 2022.

An outstanding scientist, a laureate of Rosenstiel Award (1988) and Nobel prize in chemistry (1989), Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University and a member of the International Advisory Board of the IBCh RAS, Sidney Altman passed away on April 5, 2022 at the age of 82. He made a fundamental contribution to the biological and medical sciences. The staff and administration of the IBCh RAS express their sincere condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Sidney Altman.

Being targeted to tumor cells, genetically-encoded NanoLuc-miniSOG construct generates internal light source and sensitizer pair, which makes possible PDT effect under BRET activation to treat tumors at virtually unlimited depth.

Traditionally, cytogenetic and molecular cytogenetic methods are used to detect chromosomal abnormalities. With the development of sequencing technologies, new approaches have become available to identify structural variations ranging from 50 bp. Researchers from the Laboratory of Molecular Oncology of Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Federal Research and Clinical Center of Physical-Chemical Medicine of Federal Medical Biological Agency developed an approach for construction of CNV validation set at the exon level and evaluated the efficiency of CNV calling tools designed for whole exome sequencing data.

Scientists from the Group of molecular tools for living system studies and Laboratory of molecular diagnostics (IBCH) together with the colleagues from Skoltech, the Federal Research Center for Physical and Chemical Medicine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and Instituto de Química-Física Rocasolano (Spain) has developed a DNA modification, 7,8-dihydro-8-oxo-1,N6-ethenoadenine (oxo-ϵA), a non-natural synthetic base that combines structural features of two naturally occurring DNA lesions (7,8-dihydro-8-oxoadenine and 1,N6-ethenoadenine).