EMBL and its community are deeply saddened by the death of Peer Bork, the organisation’s Interim Director General. 

Left off publications due to Nazi prejudice, this Jewish woman lost her rightful place in the scientific pantheon as the discoverer of nuclear fission.

The Greenland shark, the longest-living vertebrate, inhabits the dim, frigid depths of the Arctic Ocean. Despite its extreme lifespan, this study finds that its vision remains intact and well-adapted for life in dim light, revealing remarkable preservation of sensory function across centuries.

Pathogens infect hosts by interacting with host proteins and exploiting their functions to their advantage. Short linear motifs, small functional regions within intrinsically disordered protein regions, are common mediators of host-pathogen protein interactions. While motifs have been more extensively studied in viruses and bacteria, the extent to which eukaryotic unicellular parasites use motifs during infection remains unexplored. Toxoplasma gondii is a widespread intracellular Apicomplexan parasite capable of infecting all warm-blooded animals and invading any of their nucleated cells. Toxoplasma's secreted proteins are key in interacting with host proteins during infection, making them potential sources for motifs. To highlight the role of motifs in Toxoplasma gondii infection, we curated 20 known motif instances in Toxoplasma proteins from the scientific literature. To identify more motifs in Toxoplasma secreted proteins, we developed a computational pipeline that annotates putative motif matches with structural and functional features. Through this approach, we identified a set of 27,832 motif matches in 296 secreted proteins. We highlight strategies for further prioritisation of likely functional motif matches by focusing on integrin motifs, degrons and TRAF6-binding motifs. We subjected four predicted TRAF6-binding motifs to experimental validation, supporting the predicted motifs in the Toxoplasma proteins RON10 and GRA15. Our motif predictions provide a valuable resource for generating hypotheses and designing experiments to study infection mechanisms. The characterisation of motifs in Toxoplasma will be key to understanding the molecular principles underlying its broad host range and more comprehensive Apicomplexan infection strategies. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 449991970

In October, the International Society for Artificial Life recognized several SFI researchers and co-authors with the ISAL Award for Outstanding Publication of 2024. The award celebrates the paper “Fun...

The classic theory of mutation-selection balance predicts the equilibrium frequency of genetic variation under negative selection. The model predicts a simple relationship between the total frequency ...

Epigenetic landscapes were proposed by Waddington as the central concept to describe cell fate dynamics in a locally low-dimensional space. In mode...

The Toxoplasma gondii effector TgROP1 mimics host factors to bind VAPA/B, thereby establishing parasite–host ER contact sites.

Highlighted Article: A bioinert confinement system enables dissection of how stiffness and timing shape gastruloid development, revealing uncoupling between polarization and transcriptional programs.

In a new forward-looking PRL Essay, Tadashi Takayanagi explores the intersection of quantum information theory with quantum gravity within the framework of holographic duality, and its potential to he...