@johanduchene.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social Spent the last hour looking, found ten more apparently manipulated Western blots in Thermo Fisher's antibody verification data (across eight different catalogued products). Thread below. www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...

Surprised to discover that Thermo Fisher appears to show a fake western blot for the validation of one of their p53 antibodies. I've added a diagram to show the very similar bands. This does not appear to be one of the "published figures" but their own internal data.

Really interesting- there are definitely times when this can work well, but what happens in terms of resubmission? As in, you lose out purely because of the lottery but are not then allowed to submit again without substantial revision (of a technically perfect application)??

UKRI urged to be ‘transparent’ after adopting grant lotteries. Funder’s quiet introduction of randomisation option across opportunities prompts questions, plus support for “innovative” action. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

Job navigation in table view, searchable tags, 3D mesh optimized for masks, and many more features! 👉👉👉 github.com/hanjinliu/hi... Let's make our RELION directory a better place.

Authors and Reviewers in the genAI era

Fascinating new @nature.com paper: a Pluto moment for biology. It introduces the concept of 'peptideins' - a new category for dark translated ORFs that produce detectable microprotein-like products with unknown biological roles.

UKRI restricts the use of generative AI tools in review of grant proposals. If a reviewer or a panel member uses such tools, their evaluation is not taken into account. I wonder how is this going to be enforced with tools like Q.E.D. available to the community www.ukri.org/publications...

If this is true (I doubt, but possible) it is a catastrophe for science funding process. Last nail in the coffin level. Why? Because funding will remain at 10%. Nobody's going to pull a load of new cash out of the hat. So. At first - grants that use an online tool will have an advantage over ../

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:

Last weekend I received the Troland Research Award from the @nationalacademies.org. I’m so grateful to the communities who made this work possible. It's strange to receive this award at a time when much of the work being recognized is not eligible for federal funding. My remarks 👇 and a 🧵>>

I've been fortunate to have @marcoenriquez18.bsky.social a #materialsChemist in my team. Cytoskeletal elements are often studied on their own but in reality, the #cytoskeleton is biopolymer network that is intricately intertwined. (#Award winning movie Light Microscopy Aus). @aibnatuq.bsky.social

🚨PSA: .pptx / .key files are technically ZIP containers. Thus, you can unzip to obtain a folder structure with all videos, images etc. For Windows: change extension to zip, then unzip For Apple: go to folder (cd) with pptx (or key) in Terminal & run: unzip "presentation.pptx" -d "pptx_contents"

For those who missed this at the other place: open.substack.com/pub/mikhoeli...

Our flagship conference celebrating everything centrosomes and cilia returns this year and it promises to be another exceptional scientific event in the beautiful city of Lausanne, 1–4 September. 👉 Abstract submission+registration deadline 1 June Don’t miss the opportunity to share your research 🤩

The plot chickens

The increased time from submission to publication in 'the most desirable scientific journals' is a clear 'buyer-beware' signal for trainees & PIs who feel compelled to submit there. Unfortunately, this also makes me suspicious of papers that didn't spend the minimum 2 years in editorial purgatory

I don't recall any previous transformative technologies that had to be sold to the public so hard. No one in 1999 was going, "Guys. Cell phone? It's coming, whether we like it or not. I think it's important, FOR WOMEN ESPECIALLY, to learn about cell phone. So that we're not left behind!!"

I want a "conference" where every academic cooks a dish for everyone and we all talk about our work casually while cooking. People can sous chef for each other. We eat and talk about our work in progress. You submit an abstract and a recipe.

Don't fear AI, fear humans who use AI

My lab and @smarino0111.bsky.social lab are currently looking for 2 PDRAs on a 3-year @bartscharity.bsky.social funded project. The posts will be based in Blizard Institute within Queen Mary Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. Check out the details and apply here: qmul-jobs.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/...

It's been a while... dusted off some old code to see what the current publication lag times are at cell bio journals. At the end of the post there's the poor paper with the longest delay in the dataset... Hold On Hope: publication lag times at cell biology journals quantixed.org/2026/04/09/h...

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Brutal.

Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.

Since last year, I've been making a RELION GUI that supports viewing, navigating and running jobs in a way completely compatible with the original RELION pipeline. Now it's working nicely for both SPA and tomography! Please try it out - github.com/hanjinliu/hi...

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.

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... “Management consultants are ruining UK universities”. No, fleecing.

"Why is publishing so expensive?" It's a question I hear all the time, so we at @biologists.bsky.social thought we'd try to dispel some of the myths around publishing economics & provide transparency around our costs. Today, we publish editorials in all 5 of our journals - links in the thread below.

🤖AI tools for peer-review? I want to share my experience using q.e.d. science (www.qedscience.com), a reviewing tool with high-profile endorsements. I will report results and my impressions from the use /1

Chromosomes stuck behind the spindle are ticking time bombs for aneuploidy. We uncovered a mechanical rescue mechanism where microtubule pivoting repositions these high-risk chromosomes! Out last week in @natcomms.nature.com, here's a thread 🧵 shorturl.at/OD89x

Microtubules guide Aurora B substrate geometries for accurate chromosome segregation pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41880487/ #cryoem

Proper chromosome segregation requires microtubule end capture by outer kinetochore @vladimirvolkov.bsky.social et al show that oligomerizing interactions of Ndc80 & Ska complexes underlie their ability to stabilize microtubule ends against detachment & shortening link.springer.com/article/10.1...

In memoriam Fazly Ataullakhanov was a biophysicist with a rich heritage, and a strong scientific legacy. An ethnic Tadjik, born in Samarkand (Soviet Uzbekistan), educated in Moscow, made his best scientific contributions in English, collaborating with international researchers in the USA. /1

Also do check out a related manuscript that came out last week. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share our work on the structure and function of cytoplasmic lattices within mouse embryos. A collaborative effort with @niakanlab.bsky.social and work led by @kashishsingh.bsky.social and @inaharasimov.bsky.social . It is now out on BioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Happy to see the first paper from the lab published in the EMBO J today: link.springer.com/article/10.1... In it, we reconstitute self-assembling cooperative oligomers of human Ndc80 and Ska kinetochore complexes that stabilise microtubule ends, and study these samples using cryoET and TIRF

Odd to claim transparency when saying "applicant-led funding – the central pillar of blue skies research – is growing substantially" while being silent on disciplinary changes within that budget e.g. blue skies funding in old MRC delivery plan was c.£200m pa is £113m pa in UKRI budget explainer

BBC article on research funding in the UK. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Our new paper is featured on the Inside Back Cover of Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed.! doi.org/10.1002/anie... We show that coumarin-30, a classic laser dye, can serve as a versatile fluorescent probe for tubulin, enabling site-resolved detection of diverse ligands. doi.org/10.1002/anie...

Sorry for US exceptionalism, but Pi day is not today. It is on April 31st as the true irrational day it should be

It turns out the U.S. did a “double tap” attack just as emergency responders were arriving at the girls’ elementary school. This is what the Russians do routinely in Ukraine. That’s a war crime under international humanitarian law.

Fancy a fresh preprint for Friday? When we were first getting involved with single molecule FRET, there weren't any standard protein molecules that suited our applications to help us develop our pipeline. So we built some! A universal protein ladder for FRET. 🧵 1/

"Trying to compete with Reform not only feels inauthentic... but a betrayal of what Labour is supposed to represent. We must address the concerns and fears of voters, not play on them." Damning stuff from Sadiq Khan www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I have multiple positions available to join my lab from this summer: #postdoc, #student and #technician. Adverts to follow but see www.saurinlab.com for further details. #senescence, #mitosis, #cellcycle, #phosphorylation are the key areas. Email me if interested.

Please spread the word: the Structural Studies Division @mrclmb.bsky.social is looking for a new tenure-track, independent group leader with an exciting plan in any area of Structural (Molecular & Cell) biology, in discovery biology and/or methods development. 🥳 mrc.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/...

Open Postdoc position in our lab! #actin #Huntingtin #cryoET #cellbio If you enjoy working at the interface of cell biology, structural biology, and quantitative imaging, this could be an excellent fit. ista.ac.at/en/job/postd... Please share and feel free to reach out if there are questions!

holy shit PR from an ‘agent’ gets closed so it writes a blog post with a personal takedown Some interesting comments from the maintainers too Slop machine go brr, dead internet theory x1000 github.com/matplotlib/m...

#InMemoriam: Dr. Robert Bruce Nicklas, who spent over 50 years unraveling the mysteries of how #chromosomes move during #CellDivision, died on February 19, 2025, at the age of 92. Leocadia Paliulis commemorates his life and work. rupress.org/jcb/article/...