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A health-care worker vaccinates a woman with the Abdala jab in August.Credit: Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty
Promise for Cuba’s home-grown vaccines
Cuba’s bet on producing its own COVID-19 vaccines seems to be paying off. The Finlay Institute of Vaccines reports that one of the institute’s vaccines, Soberana 02, is more than 90% effective in protecting against symptomatic COVID-19 infection when used in combination with a related vaccine, Soberana Plus. In July, the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology reported that its three-dose vaccine, Abdala, was more than 92% effective in phase III trials that included more than 48,000 participants, although the full results have not yet been published. As of 18 November, 89% of Cuba’s population — including children as young as 2 — has received at least one dose of Soberana 02 or Abdala.
Reference: medRxiv preprint & Cuba government press release
No bones, no scales, still tasty
More than a dozen companies are developing lab-grown fish and shellfish in a move that could help to address some of the challenges associated with the real thing. The seafood is made by harvesting cells from a small number of donor fish or shellfish and culturing them in a bioreactor. But the cost of producing the protein is astronomical — sometimes topping US$20,000 per kilogram.
Nature Biotechnology | 8 min read
Iodine-powered satellite test success
A satellite has been propelled by an iodine-based electric engine for the first time. Electric-propulsion thrusters use electrical energy to accelerate the ions of a propellant gas. Currently, such engines are almost always fuelled with xenon, which is rare, expensive and must be stored under high pressure. Solid, uncompressed iodine transforms directly into gas when heated — a property that can be exploited to create cheap, compact engines.
Get the expert view from space-propulsion scientist Igor Levchenko and engineer Kateryna Bazaka in the Nature News & Views article (Nature | 6 min read, Nature paywall)
Features & opinion
A model of the human nuclear pore complex, built using AlphaFold2 and structural data.Credit: Agnieszka Obarska-Kosinska
Protein-folding AI — and beyond
Artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms such as AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold can now predict a protein’s 3D shape from its linear sequence — a huge boon to structural biologists. But, for some proteins, many essential details remain out of reach. For example, AlphaFold2 typically produces a single ‘correct’ answer for each sequence, and so fails to capture the dynamic nature of many protein structures. Progress in deep learning — and a growing community of users — could bring some of these challenges to heel. And researchers continue to build a broader computational and experimental toolbox in an effort to gain a comprehensive understanding of protein biology.
Vaccines and long COVID
Vaccines reduce the risk of developing COVID-19 — but studies disagree on their protective effect against long-lasting symptoms that can follow the disease. Understanding the prevalence of long COVID among vaccinated people has urgent implications in places where public-health restrictions are being eased. It could also offer clues about what causes lingering illness long after the acute infection has cleared.
Mammoth tusk recovered from deep sea
Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute made a surprising discovery while using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to explore the waters off California. “We were just flying along and I look down and see it and go ‘that’s a tusk’,” said ROV pilot Randy Prickett. “I said ‘if we don’t grab this right now you’ll regret it’.” Not only was it a mammoth tusk, it might be from an animal that died during the Lower Paleolithic era, from which well-preserved specimens are rare. The finding suggests that the ocean floor could be an as-yet-untapped source of palaeontological treasures.
The New York Times | 9 min read
Where I work
Victor Chaumeau is head entomologist at the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, based in Mae Sot, Thailand.Credit: David Høgsholt for Nature
Victor Chaumeau is head entomologist at the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, based in Mae Sot, Thailand. Here, he is collecting mosquitoes in Kayin state, Myanmar, in one of the largest operations of its kind in the world. “It looks like I’m working alone in this picture. In reality, I’m with a team of about 50 people,” he says. “Most of the collection is done by local villagers… we travel by boat, scooter, tractor or car, and sometimes by elephant, to our sites.” The hundreds of thousands of insects they have collected have shown that interventions to control malaria that work well in Africa, such as insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor spraying, are less effective in southeast Asia owing to the variety of mosquitoes there that feed outside or during the day. “We’ve also shown that providing antimalarial drugs to select populations prophylactically — known as mass drug administration — vastly reduces the number of mosquitoes carrying the parasite,” says Chaumeau. (Nature | 3 min read)
