Check out a new pub from the mcmorais lab on the role of bacteriophage scaffold proteins in the self-assembly and maturation of virus capsids: science.org/doi/10.1126/scia… This work was largely driven by my former colleague at UTMB Mike Woodson.

This post is a little late, but the mcmorais lab is happy to announce our recent review on the mechanochemistry of virus dsDNA packaging motors: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3950… Congratulations to my co-authors Josh Pajak, Nikolai Prokhorov, and Paul Jardine

How does enterovirus protease specifically recognize its viral RNA genome? Hint: It takes two! Happy to share our publication in @ScienceAdvances Structure of coxsackievirus cloverleaf RNA and 3C protease dimer establishes its RNA-binding mechanism shorturl.at/xvrh1

Just submitted a new manuscript. Takes at least a day to format everything and submit. If accepted, it will cost me nearly 5K. I did the research, unpaid reviewers reviewed the manuscript, and then I format everything for publication. What am I actually paying 5K for?

IU biology professor Tuli Mukhopadhyay was awarded the 2025 Alice C. Evans Award for Advancement of Women, which recognizes outstanding contributions toward the full participation and advancement of women in microbial sciences. Read more: go.iu.edu/8rwF

Congratulations to mcmorais lab member Ahmed Bello, winner of a FASEB Virus Assembly poster award. Ahmed is on the far left. He is unstoppable.

Since our last post, Disnie Ranathunga received a 2024 Executive Dean’s Travel Award for Women in Science. Apparently Disnie cannot be stopped.

Disnie Ranathunga, a third year student the Morais lab, was awarded a FASEB travel award to attend the FASEB Virus Assembly meeting in Southbridge MA this summer. Go Disnie.

I wish the NIH and NSF would stop changing the formats for biosketch, other support, facilities, etc. It is superconfusing, time consuming, and the new formats don't seem to provide anymore information

Happy to share our new paper on HIV Rev response element (RRE) @NatureComms. Congratulations @jerrichotipo and Keerthi Gottipati. Structure of HIV-1 RRE stem-loop II identifies two conformational states of the high-affinity Rev binding site nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

Congratulations to mcmoraislab graduate student Disnie Ranathunga for being awarded an IUB-Edgar Eleanor Peglow Award. Well done Disnie.

Congratulations to mcmoraislab graduate student Ahmed Bello for being awarded an IUB-Edgar Eleanor Fellowship.

The mcmorais lab is happy to welcome first year IU MCB graduate student Octavio Origel Jr. to the lab.

Check out our new publication in NAR with Carlos Catalano's lab at UC Denver on the bacteriophage lambda dsDNA packaging motor: doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkad1135

Hello X/twitter-world, the mcmorais lab has arrived