September: Engineering fur softness; HRT biochemistry

Hello everyone! We're excited to share with you our September newsletter, which starts off with a really special article:

RESULTS from our wet-lab project! Tilt has successfully observed interactions between parts of Wnt and Frizzled proteins involved in regulating fur softness. This information will help us engineer fur, and some of the peptides that Tiltwolf develops may literally make their way into real drugs we eventually develop. This would be years in the future of course, but this is definitively applied research.

Tilt found that a specific amino acid matters for whether or not parts of Wnt and Frizzled1 proteins bind together. Identifying binding partners is one of the most important parts of developing new types of treatments and interventions. Please keep in mind this work is very much Research Use Only.

Tilt also has a proposed structure for that binding event. A static image is in the newsletter PDF itself, but we're also attaching a rotating structure here since it's more informative than a single viewpoint of the structure.

Then, I personally wrote the second article. Tilt's act is a hard one to follow, but I'm unveiling a new page getting added to the Gender Resources Project on the website. In this page, I talk about how HRT medicines work at a conceptual level. This is probably "bonus" content for a lot of people, since you don't literally need to know how drugs work as long as they work.  

But, it could help interested people be more active participants in their healthcare, and understand why some decisions about HRT, such as whether a pill, injection, or patch are used, or why this-or-that medicine are used, can be surprisingly important. 

As always, thank you so much to everyone here for your support. We wouldn't be here doing all this without you!

Best,

Zennith