What a soccer weekend! Kicked things off at KC House, where I heard about exciting things happening in KC, then headed to a wild Algeria vs Austria match with great friends. Beautiful game, even better company. ⚽️🇩🇿

To George and Laura, Bill and Hillary — we're grateful for your friendship, counsel, and devotion to this country. And to Joe and Jill, thank you for being on this journey with us.

Bucket list checked. Arrowhead was fully taken over by Argentina last night and the passion was unreal. We took the boys to watch them beat Algeria 3-0, capped by the first world cup hat trick for Messi. Started at KC FanFest, ended watching history. One we’ll never forget. 🇦🇷⚽️

How does a DNA repair enzyme find a needle in a haystack? 🧬 Our latest paper in NAR, led by the one and only C-trap queen Kaitlin Dehart, uses single-molecule imaging to watch APE1 scan DNA and lock onto AP-sites. @lumicks.bsky.social academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

I am honored to receive a 2026 University Scholarly Achievement Award from KU. They say it takes a village. Mine took a village and then some: my lab, my trainees, my family. The award has my name on it, but it is theirs. They do they hard work and make this the best job ever!🙏 youtu.be/o-KcgX3IiP8

That's a wrap on the 25th Annual Midwest DNA Repair Symposium at the University of Kansas Medical Center. Two days, 175 attendees, 4 keynotes, 22 talks, and 85 posters of genuinely incredible science (also some fun socializing of course). I am still smiling, but a bit tired. 🧬🌻

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... New research space for the group: RNA binding proteins! Been chipping away at this for about 3 years now. But, pretty cool to see how a single PTM in an IDR changes overall configurational states of ordered domains.

A season of change in the lab. 🎓 Hooding ceremony for Spencer Thompson who is headed back to the clinic. 🧬 Zach Onyszchuk joins the lab as a graduate student 🔬 Nicholas @nicholaswashton.bsky.social joins the lab as Senior Scientist Excited for what's ahead!!

Action packed Mother’s Day weekend celebrating Jean, cheering on Pierce at his big improv show and watching Grayson’s team bring home tournament gold. This is what great moms do, even on the weekends meant to celebrate them. Grateful for you, Jean. ❤️

We are excited to have Nicholas join the team and see what amazing science we can do together! Also a great connection to the Barnes lab to help with the synergy across our groups.

Big congrats to Spencer Thompson on defending his thesis today! Beautiful @lumicks.bsky.social C-Trap single-molecule work and a major MD/PhD milestone. Proud PI! BioRxiv coming soon.

Abstract deadline approaching (April 15) for the Midwest DNA Repair meeting. Join us for an exciting meeting with outstanding science and valuable networking. Register and share. $100 includes meals, networking, and social events. sites.google.com/view/kumc-mi...

Congratulations and welcome to the newest members of the #ACSBIOL Executive Committee! @freudlab.bsky.social, @doc-jlmeier.bsky.social, @tmweaver.bsky.social, @ebraselmann.bsky.social

Great way to wrap up the ski season at Steamboat over spring break last week on a wonderful trip with family and friends. The boys definitely leveled up and are now hitting black diamonds! ⛷️

Great seminar visit to UC Riverside hosted by Linlin Zhao. Excellent discussions with a terrific group of trainees and scientists exploring a wide range of exciting science. Thanks to Linlin for the warm hospitality!

Great first Fusion meeting! 🧬 Presented our telomere/ribonucleotide work. Huge congrats to Abbey Vito for winning Best Poster and Most Engaged 🏆👏 Always great catching up with friends in the field. And the weather didn’t hurt ☀️

Wonderful few days skiing in New Mexico. Every trip the boys get stronger, more controlled, and confident. It is fun to watch the progression in real time. Some fresh snow helped too!

So, to wrap up today's insanity: President Trump, who is deeply implicated in a pedophilia scandal involving his best friend, the sex trafficker, sent Attorney General Bondi -- who only has that job because Trump's first choice was also implicated in a separate pedophilia scandal -- to the House...

“What do you think the odds are that person is a goat fucker?!” Grade A trolling

Such a great conference for trainees and early career scientists. Going back for the first time last year (since leaving the Midwest) this conference felt like home. Such a wonderful supportive DNA repair community. Awesome science and even better people!!

This 👇is such a great opportunity for young scientists in the field. I “grew up” on this conference & still hold so many meaningful relationships to this day that I made at these conferences.

Great conference!!

📣 The 2026 Midwest DNA Repair Symposium is coming to Kansas City (registration is open) 🗓 May 30–31, 2026 ✨ Talks will be selected from abstracts, with a strong focus on trainees and new investigators. Please RT & share with your labs! 🔗 sites.google.com/view/kumc-mi...

🎉Kicking off 2026 with our first paper from the Freudenthal lab in NAR. Ribonucleotides reshape telomeric G4s and are resistant to RNase H2 repair. Congrats to the authors and huge thanks to our collaborator Hui-Ting Lee! academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Fun filled weekend in San Diego and LA! Really nice to escape the cold and catch up with Mark and Amiel.

I tend to mostly post positive lab outcomes, but not every update is a win. Received my first not discussed grant score of the year. Part of the process and still plenty of year left. 🤞January has been a month. 😞

Minneapolis public schools canceled classes officials after Roosevelt High School said armed Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders www.mprnews.org/story/2026/0...

Is NHEJ truly a double-strand break repair pathway...repairing both strands, at the same time?

📢 Telomere community: Registration and abstract submission are now open for the EMBO Workshop “Telomere function and maintenance in health and disease”, May 25–30, 2026, in Lazise, Italy 🇮🇹. Looking forward to an exciting meeting! Please re-post. meetings.embo.org/event/26-tel...

Amazing to see the C-Trap in action! We’re proud that the C-Trap plays a part in supporting cancer research in @freudlab.bsky.social lab at @kucancercenter.bsky.social! 🙌

Grateful to host Sen. Moran and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharyya in the lab today. Proud of our trainees, who showcased their work using the @lumicks.bsky.social C-Trap and the KU Cryo-EM Facility. Their dedication shows how federal investment drives cancer research at @kucancercenter.bsky.social.

Thrilled to share that the final piece of my PhD work is now on bioRxiv! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... With support from @nvidia and the @NSF, we used AlphaFold to screen 1.6M+ protein pairs, revealing thousands of potential novel PPIs. All data can be viewed at predictomes.org/hp

They’ve laid off so many people that the government is now getting its economic data from DoorDash.

Check out the perspective my lab wrote with @freudlab.bsky.social. We provide our perspective on recent work describing the structural basis of chromatin-based base excision repair!

🎉 Joint paper from the Freudenthal and @tmweaver.bsky.social Labs! Abbey Vito’s first publication discusses a tug-of-war between BER enzymes and chromatin for access to damaged DNA, a battle central to genome stability. Built on Tyler's foundational work! tinyurl.com/ywkt2bt5

It was wonderful hosting you for the seminar visit! Also appreciate you being a good sport for having an anglerfish introduce you.🤣

🎃 Happy Halloween from the Freudenthal Lab! 🐟🖤 Anglerfish PI + Emo Researchers = Bioluminescent Despair #Scienceunderpressure

One of my favorite activities of the year is our annual pumpkin carving competition with the Bose Lab. Everyone’s pumpkins were amazing!

I think people adjacent to science (but who now find themselves deciding the fate of US science somehow) undervalue humility, valuing braggadocios hubris instead. Yes it’s true that some scientific discoveries are complete paradigm changers, and we celebrate these. 1/

By far. Juvenile.

whoever did this little bit of magnificence, take a bow

Spread the word if you can. We have an unused stopped flow accessory from Applied Photophysics. We traded in our Chirascan CD instrument so we have no use for this anymore. Reach out if you are interested and can find a home for this setup. Will ofcourse only work with a Chirascan!

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside Santa Fe were beautiful today! Wonderful day for a hike.

Congratulations to our #EMGS2025 Best Oral Presentation Award Winners! Best Student Oral Presentation 1st Place (Tied): David Schuster and Abigayle Vito 2nd Place: Foster Jacobs Best Early Career Investigator Oral Presentation 1st Place: Elijah Newcomb 2nd Place: Lindsay Volk

The fiscal year is over. So how was the NIH appropriation committed? A long thread with institute by institute results about where the money went.

The fiscal year ends tomorrow. Here are results from NIH Reporter downloaded an hour ago. The total amount of funding committed for FY2025 at this point is 99.0% of that for FY2024. The same difference could be due to a variety of technical factors. 1/3

How it started: Assistant to the Professor 👨‍🔬✨ How it’s going: Professor mode unlocked 👨‍🏫 Also clear evidence that science doesn’t just build knowledge… it ages ya too. 😉 🙏Grateful to all the mentors, colleagues, trainees, friends & family who made this journey possible. I am here because you all!

Here is a plot in terms of PROJECTS rather than dollars. I am using projects rather than awards so that projects that received supplements do not get double-counted. While the FY25 curve is improving, it seems that the number of funded projects will drop by 3000-4000 compared with FY24.

i think regardless of who has authored a paper, we (the scientific community) can and should stop criticizing the work on lack of perceived novelty. we can do better than perpetuating harmful myths about individual scientific papers having to present a discovery no one has ever thought of before.

This one is a bit of a departure from the usual and definitely a work in progress! We found that by using ab initio reconstruction at very high res, in very small steps, we could crack some small structures that had eluded us - e.g. 39kDa iPKAc (EMPIAR-10252), below. Read on for details... 1/x