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Read about our story in the Washington Post!

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Huge thank you to co-first author Marissa Acciani who did all the work on antibody discovery and characterization, and our collaborators Matteo Porotto, Stefan Niewiesk, and Erica Ollmann Saphire.

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This work establishes, for the first time, the structural and functional map of the human antibody response to measles.

We also benchmarked AlphaFold3 against our experimental structures. It accurately predicted antibody-binding sites for only 2 of 12 complexes. Experimental structure determination remains essential.

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Protection also holds therapeutically. Antibodies delivered 24 to 48 hours after infection still significantly reduced viral lung titers in animal models, opening a window for post-exposure treatment.

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Both groups neutralize at picomolar concentrations and retain potency against currently circulating strains.

The most protective anti-H antibodies block the receptor-binding site. The most potent anti-F neutralizers bind the apex of the prefusion trimer and lock it against refolding, with the largest thermal stability shifts recorded for any F-specific antibody.

Using cryo-EM, we solved the structures of antibody complexes with both proteins, allowing us to map where humans target the virus and why some antibodies work better than others.

We isolated the first panel of fully human monoclonal antibodies against both measles surface proteins, hemagglutinin (H) and fusion (F), from the memory B cells of a single MMR vaccinee, years after vaccination.

Dimitry Tegunov @dtegunov.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Measles is coming back. Until now, we didn't know how human antibodies actually recognize and neutralize the virus. No structure of either measles surface protein bound to a human antibody had ever been reported. We set out to change that.

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Reposted by Dawid Zyla

We're super excited to share MissAlignment: a new ML-based approach to reference-free tilt series alignment, spearheaded by @martenchaillet.bsky.social. We think it's going to make your cryo-ET life a lot better. Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Code: github.com/warpem/miss-... 🧶 Thread:

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Jason McLellan @mclellanlab.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Our fourth installment on prefusion herpesvirus gB proteins is available as a preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202.... Working with Ivelin Georgiev's group, we isolated and characterized prefusion-specific HSV gB antibodies from humans!

Cryo-EM structures of prefusion HSV-2 gB in complex with human antibodies.

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Reposted by Dawid Zyla

Lars-Anders Carlson @lacarlson.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

I am super happy to share this paper in its final form. We used FIB milling to "dig in to" cell lines and mouse brains infected with tick-borne flaviviruses, followed by cryo-ET to study the virus replication. It's open access, so have a look! #virology #teamtomo www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Cryo-electron tomography reveals coupled flavivirus replication, budding and maturation - Nature Communications

In this study, Dahmane et al use a method called cryo-electron tomography to uncover new details of how tick-borne flaviviruses transform cells into virus factories.

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Dawid Zyla @dzyla.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Thank you so much, Karolin, and I am looking forward to participating in the Denver-wide cryo-EM community!

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Thank you so much, Joost!

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Thanks, Ahmad! It's been quite a ride, but I still have a feeling that the good stuff is just about to start :D

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Structural Dynamics of Molecular Machines

I am hiring Postdocs and RAs. If you are interested in structural biology and want to move to beautiful Colorado, I'd love to hear from you. 🏔️ Website: zylalab.org

zylalab.org

Zyla Lab

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The Lab will study the structural dynamics of virus-immune complexes: ❄️ Viral conformational changes, ❄️ Antibody neutralization, and ❄️ Method development

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Hanjin Liu @liu-hanjin.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

I never imagined I'd be writing this, but I am happy to share that, starting this June, I will be joining @cuanschutz.bsky.social @cu-bmg.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor.

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Reposted by Dawid Zyla

CryoEM folks, If you want to handle huge STAR file efficiently in Python, please try starfile-rs! github.com/hanjinliu/star… Reading a motion data of a particle from a 15 MB file is just like this ↓🤩

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Helen Branswell 🇨🇦 @helenbranswell.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

The US #measles count for this year has topped 2,000 cases for the first time since 1992. These are confirmed cases only, ie there have been more. 3 reported deaths. The vast majority of the cases are in unvaccinated kids & adults. 11% needed hospitalization. www.cdc.gov/measles/data...

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cryoEM papers @cryoempapers.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Stabilized Full-Length Measles Fusion Protein Elicits Potent Immunity and Protection In Vivo pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41278811/ #cryoEM

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Reposted by Dawid Zyla

Daniel Hurdiss @danielhurdiss.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

It’s been a while since I put together the Structural Virology starter pack, and I’m sure some new folks have joined Bluesky since then. There’s still plenty of space to fill, so if you’d like to be added to the list just let me know. #virology #cryoEM go.bsky.app/Qxv95BL

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Thank you so much! Regarding the camera movement, this is one of the things I still need to implement, along with the canvas shift (the simulation window is completely independent of the camera). Also, chain selection should be possible; I just didn't have time to add. Soon!

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Sounds great! Yes, in this app, there is just a very simple elastic network based on C alphas, inheriting the mass from the actual residue (more like coarse-grained), with extra restraints for nucleic acids and some tweaks for glycans.

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Thanks, Brady! I can fully see a similar idea implemented in the Molecular Nodes! I was also working on the Python implementation of the real MD simulations, but surprisingly, Python is much less flexible than JavaScript for live runs.

It works quite well for alphafold noodles!

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I was experimenting with Gemini 3 Pro recently and realized that it's much easier to develop real-time visual apps in JavaScript than in Python. The long exposure effect was the main idea, but then the trace persistence slider gave quite a surprising effect.

Some time ago, I generated a set of attractors and printed them to hang in my apartment. I like abstract art much more when it provokes thought. My wife was not a big fan of it, so the project is still waiting for its chance 😅

This is so cool! I knew something similar had to be done before. My inspiration came from the Python library Datashader and the Holoviz tutorial on visualizing attractors, as the one attached.