by Gertrud U. Rey Have you ever wondered if you can "mix and match" SARS-CoV-2 vaccines? For example, would it be ok to boost a first dose of the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca with a dose of the vaccine produced by Pfizer/BioNTech? The latest science shows that such a vaccine ...

From the authors of Paul Has Measles and Paul Stays Home comes Paul and the Mosquitos, an illustrated book for children about mosquito-borne diseases. In his camp, Paul and his friends discuss which is the most dangerous animal of all. They would never have imagined it would be the mosquito. ...

In the two previous installments (one, two) of what has now become my praise of T cells, I explained that the SARS-CoV-2 protein sequences recognized by T cells do not change, likely explaining why vaccines prevent serious disease and death caused by any variant. Today I will explain that virus-specific ...

The ancestors of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) moved from land to the sea over 50 million years ago. Many viruses infect cetaceans, but how they evolved during the shift from land to sea is unknown. Fossilized retroviral genomes integrated into cetacean DNA provide insight into this question. The retroviral ...

Starting with a bacterial protein, directed evolution in the laboratory has been used to produce a virus-like capsid that binds and protects RNA. This finding has implications for the origins of viruses. One view of the evolution of life is that viruses were present even before the first cells in ...