Exciting job offer: PhD Program Manager. Lead recruitment, support PhD candidates, and shape doctoral training at a top international life sciences campus. https://ow.ly/3YkN50YAuGM Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, Max Perutz Labs Vienna, IMP, Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology

How diverse is bacterial immunity ? We report in @science.org how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems. 👏 @emordret.bsky.social, @alexhv.bsky.social & al doi.org/10.1126/scie... Explore them here defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...

Every PI

Our work on chromatin evolution in brown algae is now published in @natecoevo.nature.com! We show that developmentally complex brown algae evolved without epigenetic silencing pathways long thought universal, underscoring why non-model lineages are important to study. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Germ cells have their own versions of core transcription factors and fertility depends on them. We're hiring a PhD student to figure out how! 📢 Fly genetics + proteomics + genomics. Fully funded. Aarhus University 🇩🇰 Deadline May 1 👇 Please share with anyone who might be interested!

There is nowhere else in the world (that I am aware of) where phenology has been recorded as regularly as in Kyoto, Japan. Records here of peak cherry blossom bloom go back to the year 812. Those blooms have been getting earlier in recent years due to climate change and urban heat island effects.

Proper organelle regulation during mitosis is a must, but how do membrane-less condensates like PML bodies behave during cell division? In work led by Eric Aird, we found the balance of speckled proteins SP110 & SP100 to be the key. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Hello, world! We are starting a worker cooperative to build, maintain, teach, and support open source scientific imaging software. image.coop/blog/posts/2...

What an opportunity! Don’t miss it!!

I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be starting my lab as a SNSF starting grant professor at the Center for Integrative Genomics in Lausanne! I'm looking for PhD students who are fascinated about the neuronal basis of behaviour across species @fbm-unil.bsky.social

We’re excited to share our latest preprint on Fractal: our approach towards FAIR bioimage analysis at scale with OME-Zarr-native workflows. Fractal defines interoperable tasks on OME-Zarr and provides a platform for TB-scale image analysis. (1 / 10🧵) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A consortium of group leaders from IMP, IMBA (Vienna BioCenter) and ISTA has been awarded an FWF Emerging Fields grant to study how germ cells safeguard and pass on genetic information across generations.

Need to annotate transposons in fungal genomes? 🧬 Good news #MycoMobilome is now live! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1093/narg... Access the sequences through our Zenodo community (you can also contribute seqs with credit), and synchronisation with @dfam.bsky.social! w/ @danielcroll.bsky.social

With Eugene Koonin, we propose a concept of “the selfish ribosome”, under which evolution of life is viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensures the propagation of the ribosome. arxiv.org/abs/2602.23268

Our Lab is searching a postdoc for an exciting ERC-funded project that will start this summer. Apply if you’re passionate about multi-omics, cutting-edge computational approaches, and exploring biological questions across the animal 🪼 🪱 🐞 🦎 🦋 🕷️ tree of life www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/open-positio...

LINE-L1, HIV, Ty3 retrotransposons in insects. several of these genomes are > 40% adenosine! What is the molecular origin & evolutionary pressure resulting in A-rich genomes of retrotransposons & some retroviruses? it must be so hardwired that hosts exploit this bias for genome defense any ideas?

Brainwashing, 2026 edition. This paper shows how X's algorithmic feed shifts people's views rightwards. It's a sophisticated, highly effective form of reorientation. And it is utterly chilling. If you're still on that platform, unhook yourself now. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The human BAF chromatin remodeler processes nucleosomes bound by pioneer transcription factors OCT4–SOX2

The spring call for the ELBE Postdoctoral Fellows Program is open now: www.csbdresden.de/join-us/as-a.... Join the @csbdresden.bsky.social for a fully funded fellowship. @mpi-cbg.de @mpipks.bsky.social

Started this project years ago, but now everything is deposited on @addgene.bsky.social and a short @protocolsio.bsky.social is online. Try it out to make your own (cheap) homemade nuclease/Benzonase! dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.261ged7xov47/v2 Thank you @jcoker10.bsky.social and Michael Lim!

How does the piRNA pathway solve the self vs. non-self problem? 🧬 Since piRNAs come from single-stranded RNA, how does the cell choose the right ones? For years, "piRNA clusters" were seen as THE privileged source. But are they really special and earmarked for biogenesis? (1/19)

Ooooh. Cool new paper on origins of life. A simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚀 We’re hiring! The Structural Biology Platform is seeking a Project Leader to advance cryo-electron tomography and expand capabilities at the FMI. Join a vibrant research community at the interface of structural biology, cell biology & disease mechanisms. Apply at: www.fmi.ch/education-ca...

Ulrich’s research will help advance our understanding of RNA biology & gene regulation, as well as how these mechanisms might be altered during viral infections & other diseases. @hohmannulrich.bsky.social comes from the @impvienna.bsky.social / @imbavienna.bsky.social www.imb.de/about-imb/ne...

Fun fuels collaboration

Really excited to join IMB for this new scientific endeavour!

Episode 0 of new Florian Krammer podcast viroLOGICAL is online: “This first episode is a little longer and gives a general overview of viruses and viral diseases.“ virological.podigee.io

Would anyone out there be able to share some Mus Spretus DNA with us? 🐀🧬 Any tissue of origin, for PCR amplification of selected genomic regions. Many thanks in advance!

🍄Transposon traffic in the mycocosmos🍄 Fascinating work reveals extensive horizontal TE transfer across fungi (@jromeijn.bsky.social, Iñigo Bañales & @mfseidl.bsky.social; doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...). I wrote a Dispatch to prime non-specialists,check it out here: doi.org/10.1016/j.cu.... #TEworldwide

☕Earl Grey v7.0.0 brewed fresh☕ Nested TEs finally get the treatment they deserve: iterative detection of deep nesting, cleaner GFF annotations, and coverage stats that don’t double-count genomic space + a RepeatCraft edge-case fix. Happy new year to the TE folks! 🧬 github.com/TobyBaril/Ea...

1/3 🚨New paper from our lab!🔥 Most textbooks will tell you that invertebrates employ #RNAi as antiviral mechanism. Yet, do 🪸🪼 actually do it? Well, the answer is complicated. We show that in #Nematostella dsRNA induces RNAi 🧵 journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

This went under the radar but answers a fundamental question in Epigenetics... From many hundreds of olfactory receptor genes, each neuron selects expression of only single one (near-randomly). How? Outstanding work from Mathieu Boulard and colleagues www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Modern biology research is biased towards investigating genes that are widely conserved and present in humans. What about genes that ARE widely conserved but NOT present in humans? Can genes missing from humans tell us something about what makes our biology different from that of other animals? 1/8

Do transcriptional activators work on any promoter? Our data says no. 🙅‍♂️ Despite driving ~2/3 of mammalian genes, CpG island (CGI) promoters have remained a puzzle. We identified >50 activators that are exclusively compatible with this promoter class. 🧬

Activator-promoter compatibility in mammals - Hcfc1 is a key and intrinsically CGI-promoter-specific co-activator that cannot activate non-CGI promoters. Lead by @nemcko.bsky.social & Kevin Sabath in collab. with @plaschkalab.bsky.social @impvienna.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/2)

Intrigued by a long-standing conundrum in small RNA biology—how nuclear Argonaute proteins silence transposons when they *need* target transcription for their own recruitment—we studied the piRNA pathway. And found a hidden RNA-decay axis from Piwi to the RNA exosome.

📢 Please help spread the word: We’re hiring a Head of Student & Postdoc Affairs to coordinate our international PhD program, provide guidance & career counseling, lead training programs, collaborate on EDI initiatives, and manage alumni relations. Apply at www.fmi.ch/education-ca...

This past month marked the end of an era at the @schierlab.bsky.social @biozentrum.unibas.ch. It was a meaningful, intense, often challenging, but also incredibly rewarding chapter of my scientific journey. Thank you all in the Schier Lab for the unconditional support and the Schierleading!

Lastly, I’m excited to join @imbmainz.bsky.social in 2026 to start my own lab. We'll explore new mechanisms in eukaryotic gene expression, leveraging ‘evolutionary play’ to uncover how regulation, repurposing, and hijacking shape RNA biology. tinyurl.com/y4x29ctt Thanks for reading! 20/20

Finally out in @nature.com! We uncovered a mechanistic framework for a general and conserved mRNA nuclear export pathway. www.nature.com/articles/s41.... 1/

Are you an early-stage graduate student (2nd or 3rd year) or early-stage postdoc based in the US or Canada, working primarily in Drosophila? Would you like to help improve the experience of all trainees working in Drosophila research? If so, read on. (Please repost to reach a broad audience.)

New paper alert! Scientists in Clemens Plaschka’s lab at the IMP and @juliusbrennecke.bsky.social's lab at @imbavienna.bsky.social solved a decade-old puzzle, uncovering how the information molecule mRNA travels from the cell’s nucleus to its periphery. More: bit.ly/4nHcvys

great to be at the #EMBOMobileGenome meeting in Heidelberg with a wonderful bunch of colleagues, speakers and attendees. this meeting is a good reflection of the excitement and collegiality in the transposon field. kindly sponsored by @embo.org

Now in @embojournal.org: Researchers in @labgrosshans.bsky.social & UCSC found that similar molecular machineries control daily circadian rhythms & developmental timing—showing that evolution can repurpose core timing systems to coordinate both daily cycles & growth. www.fmi.ch/news-events/...

Three FMI researchers—Nanci Winke, @neuramos.bsky.social & @lukas-anneser.bsky.social—have received @snsf.ch Ambizione Grants! Their projects explore how emotions shape behavior, how the brain responds to anxiety treatments, and how brain states affect learning & memory 🧠 www.fmi.ch/news-events/...

The Skok Lab is recruiting an experienced computational scientist to lead single-molecule epigenomic and 3D genome analysis. We integrate long-read sequencing with Hi-C/Hi-ChIP, scmulti-omics, and machine-learning to explore chromatin topology, and gene regulation.

And the next one: dx.doi.org/10.1038/s44318-025-00585-z . Super-fun collaboration with @partchlab.bsky.social & @gotworms.bsky.social to find similarities between developmental and circadian clocks – supported by @fmiscience.bsky.social Facilities and, financially, @snsf.ch and @erc.europa.eu . 1/n

what you always wanted to know about the molecular choreography of nuclear mRNA packaging and export. thought-provoking review by our colleagues (local or in the RNA community). @plaschkalab.bsky.social @rupertfaraway.bsky.social @thezenklusen.bsky.social www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...