Congrats to the people who helped get this across the finish line - Mo Yang, Peri Prestwood, other co-authors, and collaborators Kevin Weeks and Adrian Ferre-D'Amare!

We also demonstrate for the first time that bonding interactions between ligands and K+ ions in G4s can exist. These new dyes have increased brightness and performance in imaging relative to TO and TO1-biotin (the dyes Mango II was evolved to bind).

I love doing this, especially for the gut check about how your biases and intuition for what will/won't work can be so wrong!

"rare high energy conformations"

This is the largest RNA we have published on screening to date - over 350 nt in length! This highlights the power of SMMs to discover chemical inhibitors of large, highly complex RNAs. Additionally, mechanistic work shows the mechanism of inhibition to be allosteric! Congrats to all who contributed.

We hope that this type of approach will eventually have impacts in the study and prediction of large RNA structural ensembles - and perhaps ligand discovery!