We are excited to be at our annual Bijvoet Symposium today, for a day filled with exciting structural biology presented by our PhD students and postdocs!

Take a look at the May issue: journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... On the cover: radiation damage to bound ligands in the active site of urate oxidase at 100 K and room temperature - find out more at journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202...

Great places to visit, and Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is as memorable as its name!

Please repost! This comes from the good people at ChimeraX, who produce powerful up-to-date software to study protein (etc) structures, which are FREE to the community. 🙏 To stay viable and serve us, they need an experienced structural biologist to assume the leadership role on a funded project.

An international team of researchers, including scientists from the University of Cambridge, has identified a new way coronaviruses can enter human cells. 🦠 Prof Stephen Graham explains why this breakthrough matters for future health risks. Read more 👉 www.cam.ac.uk/research/new...

Access alternate functional conformations encoded in AlphaFold’s latent space in a few GPU minutes 👇 We also introduce a novel supervised transfer task: train once on a source (GPCR/kinase/transporter) and apply across the family. Work led by Minji!

The more challenging targets CASP gets, the more the structural biology community will learn!

So, OpenAI, whose entire business model relies on some overhyped dudebros using vast amounts of stolen data and stolen labour, is releasing a specialised GPT for the life sciences. And naming it, apparently without any sense of irony or self-awareness. Rosalind.

Sad news on the passing of Prof. Andreas Engel, a pioneer in the field of cryo-EM (shared with the 3DEM community by Henning Stahlberg). Andreas' kindness, warmth, and enthusiasm for science and his colleagues will be missed.

We're a big step closer to automated determination of protein structures. The key? Having AlphaFold listen to experimental data. Great work, led by @alisiafadini.bsky.social and @minhuanli.bsky.social in an inspiring collaboration with @moalquraishi.bsky.social and @randyjread.bsky.social.

ROCKET came out on Nature Methods today. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to translate a research concept into a practical tool—one that researchers can seamlessly drop into their existing pipelines. We learned a lot along the path and will carry that spirit forward.

Exciting to see the final form of this great work out in print!

Our heavily updated final version of ROCKET for experiment-guided structure modeling is out in @naturemethods! New frontiers like high-throughput fragment screening and mid-res tomography are forcing a rethink of how experiments are modeled. ROCKET+OpenFold proposes a solution👇

Very happy to have had a chance to attack an initially very low-resolution #cryo-EM map with #ROCKET! Thank you again @alisiafadini.bsky.social and all other co-authors of this important work, which truly shows the power of combining experimental structural biology and #AI inference. rdcu.be/fa9YH

Starting from an #AlphaFold-Multimer prediction, we used #ROCKET to build a model of ZPD, a homopolymeric zona pellucida (#ZP) protein, into an initial #cryo-EM map at only ~9 Å resolution. A subsequently obtained 4.6 Å map highlighted how superior the ROCKET model was over the initial prediction:

It was a fantastic trip and a pleasure talking with the Pfizer team 😄 One highlight was discovering they’ve built a web GUI for ROCKET to make it more accessible—I’m thrilled (and even a bit surprised) to see how our tool helping people solve real-world problems.

New OpenFold3 preview out! (OF3p2) It closes the gap to AlphaFold3 for most modalities. Most critically, we're releasing everything, including training sets & configs, making OF3p2 the only current AF3-based model that is functionally trainable & reproducible from scratch🧵1/9

After an Amtrak coding session with @minhuanli.bsky.social, ROCKET team is back at @rs-station.bsky.social HQ! Thank you to Pfizer for welcoming us in Groton and to everyone who attended our seminar online. Exciting work ahead to continue exploring frontiers in structure determination. Back to it 🚀

Take a look at our March issue: journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... On the cover: the response of two paradigmatic metalloproteins of different types, one iron-containing and one copper-containing, to X-ray-induced metal reduction at cryo- and room temperature journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202...

The @thecimr.bsky.social and MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit are celebrating "Rare Research Day" TODAY! By creating factsheets on how their work contributes to greater understanding and potential treatments. #RareDiseaseDay #ShareYourColours #RareDiseaseDay2026 #UniversityofCambridge

I find Airlie’s composite self rotation representation much easier to interpret. Check it out!

At a time when the UK should be capitalising on its global reputation as a great place to do science, this is an enormous own goal. I am so sorry for all those who jobs are going to be impacted.

Finally comms from UKRI - on a Sunday evening. No mention of the hundreds of ECRs who will see their careers ended by these decisions and notably no explanation for MRC retrospectively applying cuts and wasting all the work that went into writing, reviewing and scoring applications - £millions

Missed it, thanks for pointing it out!

My hero!!! An amazing scientist and a wonderful person!

Has the MRC research funding ‘pause’ been covered by any major news network? It feels like it should be a major news story

We have a fantastic opportunity for a PhD studentship in collaboration with @jesuscollegecam.bsky.social and Cambridge Children’s Research Institute, part of the new Cambridge Children’s Hospital. Closing date 20th Feb; all the details here: www.cimr.cam.ac.uk/postgraduate...

She continues to be a lively presence at structural biology meetings. And for my money has the deepest, most intuitive understanding of protein geometry. A treasure.

By the way, this is by the @alisiafadini.bsky.social behind ROCKET!

New Title Alert: meteor- a tool for computing crystallographic difference maps that specializes in robust identification of weak signals from minor populations such as bound ligands or time-resolved experimental changes. Learn more here: buff.ly/bgJYF9N #SBGrid #SBGridSoftware #StructuralBiology

This appeared today: www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/...

Now available: the Proceedings of the 2024 @ccpem.bsky.social em Spring Symposium, including a review of the first ten years of the Symposium: journals.iucr.org/special_issues/2025/CCPEM2024/ View all of the Proceedings at journals.iucr.org/d/services/ccpem

Hope to see you there!

#IUCr2026 Pre-Congress Workshop: Structure Solution with Phenix Offers lectures and tutorials on using Phenix for automated macromolecular structure determination and validation from xtal and cryoEM data, integrating predicted models like AlphaFold event.fourwaves.com/...

Our January issue is out: journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... The cover highlights a data survey of the PDB and CSD for macromolecular and ligand structures that have been determined at elevated temperatures. Read more at doi.org/10.1107/S205...

Check our new preprint smoothing rugged Cryo-EM landscapes: shorturl.at/gYs9U We tackle practical hurdles of Optimal Transport (OT) loss—differentiability, cost & noise sensitivity—make it a feasible inference workhorse. W/ G. Woollard, D. Herreros, @pilarcossio.bsky.social, K. Dao Duc 🧵👇 (1/9)

This is a classic of the genre!

From Sameer Velankar & colleagues in @narjournal.bsky.social #NARDatabaseIssue | PDBe: enhanced structural data exploration to facilitate discovery | #Bioinformatics #Database #OpenScience #Proteomics #PDB 🧬 🖥️🧪🔓 ⬇️ academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

BBC News - Top UK scientist says research visa restrictions endanger economy www.bbc.com/news/article...

Apply for #IUCr2026 travel grants Funds are available to support students, early-career researchers, and participants from under-resourced institutions and/or developing countries. Details at event.fourwaves.com/...

🚨 Apply now for the 2026 Erice School! From Structural Biology to Structural Cell Biology with the aid of Machine Learning 📅 May 31–June 9, 2026 ⏳ Deadline: Dec 7, 2025 🌐 Info: crystalerice.org/2026

It’s great to see people thinking about tracking errors in Fourier terms! EM_placement tries to infer effects of orientation bias from half maps, but it would be far better to do this directly in the reconstruction process. No surprise it’s people like ZO and Dominika doing this work!

Giles and Burnley: Ten years of the CCP-EM Spring Symposium ##Cryoem##ElectronCryoMicroscopy##CCPEM... ##IUCrhttps://journals.iucr.org/paper?S2059798325010496

I really like the new summary representation Airlie has come up with for the self rotation function!

Frontier structural biology chases low occupancies: weak binders in drug discovery & fleeting intermediates in time-resolved studies. When squeezing SNR, confirmation bias looms – you can see what you hope to see in the noise! Enter METEOR ☄️, our denoising+phasing framework! 1/8

Chris is a brilliant structural biologist and mentor. Would highly recommend applying!

🚨Attention prospective PhD students🚨 Are you interested in molecular mechanisms, RNA viruses, structural biology or biophysics? 🧬🦠🧪 We have THREE fully-funded PhD projects available for October 2026 entry: www.findaphd.com/phds/?Keywor... Please share/repost, and get in touch if you're interested

Great collaborative environment with lots of exciting work!

Our November issue is available at journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... On the cover: recent studies demonstrate that the range of samples suitable for cryo-EM single-particle analysis is expanding towards increasingly more native samples. Read the review at shorturl.at/mitjg