Celebrating Elliot Meyerowitz‘ 75th birthday! @caltech.edu

Introducing Genie 3, a generative protein model that substantially advances the state-of-the-art for binder design, increasing in silico success rates by up to 20x on hard multimeric targets. It also debuts a form of inference-time scaling unobserved in other design models. 🧵1/8

Congratulations to Rebecca Heald on being elected 2028 ASCB President. Heald is a leading cell biologist whose work on cell division and size control—and commitment to mentoring—has had a lasting impact on the field. https://www.ascb.org/society-news/rebecca-heald-elected-2028-ascb-president/

Published a couple of months ago, but I only saw it now. Very cool work! 'Bacteria covalently incorporate polyfluoroalkyl carboxylates into membrane lipids' ttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-026-02301-x

Saddened to hear of the death of Craig Venter. A polarizing figure but he had a huge impact on biology and I enjoyed working with him on CSHL projects.

I am happy to share a review I recently wrote on the design of peptide binders. It gives an overview of experimentally validated tools and discusses the challenges of why peptide design is more difficult than the design of classical protein binders. www.chimia.ch/chimia/artic...

More details on the firing of the National Science Board. The NSF now has no director, deputy director, or board. They have issued almost no new awards in 2026. The plan appears to be to completely destroyed the agency. The details are horrifying and have Russ Vought written all over them.

1/ Thrilled to share our latest: an exciting collaboration across the @jshendure.bsky.social, @leastarita.bsky.social, @nobuhamazaki.bsky.social and @dschweppe.bsky.social labs! 🧵 below- #SystemsBiology #SCBEM #MultiOmics #Gastruloids www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to see @riddhiman.bsky.social's gastruloid multiomics paper out now at Nature Cell Bio! Riddhiman used proteomics, phosphoproteomics, and RNAseq to profile stem-cell-derived embryo models to identify protein, complex, and signaling regulators of development. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Have you wondered what the wet lab success rates are for current AI-driven protein design models? Look no further! In our new review, @kevinkaichuang.bsky.social @avapamini.bsky.social, @sarahalamdari.bsky.social, and I report wet lab success rates for *over 200* different protein design tasks 🧬💻

This may be lost in the noise--this is as impactful or more than the cuts to NIH and NSF 🧪

I am excited to share our most recent work collaborating with @centriolelab.bsky.social and @stearnslab.bsky.social to look at the ciliary base of mammalian multiciliated cells w/ cryo-ET, XL/MS, and U-ExM www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Two (or more) PhD student positions are open with me in protein structure evolution (using AI). Please apply/spread the word. su.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

If you know a graduating undergraduate looking for the chance to spend 1-2 years in a lab before graduate school, we're hiring! Our lab explores morphogenesis, defining how the cell adhesion & cytoskeletal machinery work together to allow cells to change shape & move tarheels.live/peiferlab/ 1/n RT

@compbiologist.bsky.social and @fishevodevogeno.bsky.social present newly minted Dr. Hao Yuan @yhbioinfo.bsky.social! @michiganstateu.bsky.social Amazing work @ the intersection of computational, biomedical, and evolutionary biology! Hao starts a postdoc in the @edwardmarcotte.bsky.social Lab soon.

Proud to share the yeast telomerase structure, led by the talented @hongmiaohu.bsky.social in collaboration with the Wellinger and Chartrand labs. Discovered 37 years ago and took us nearly 7 years but totally worth the wait 😍. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFE4...

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The proteina-complexa paper is the 2nd this month suggesting that high K+E content, a staple of ProteinMPNN designs, is predictive of poor expression (the bits in bio benchmark paper showed a few weeks ago). In their case, they measure poor sequence recovery in phage display

Happy birthday to 🇨🇦Canadian medical researcher & #biochemist Maud Menten (1879-1960). 👩🏼‍🔬🧪🐡 #histsci Not only was she an author of Michaelis-Menten equation for enzyme kinetics, she invented the azo-dye coupling for alkaline phosphatase, 1st example of enzyme histochemistry, still used in imaging of

Mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck is one of the founders of modern geometric analysis. #OTD in 2019, she became the first woman to win the Abel Prize, the "Nobel Prize of Math." She donated half the prize money to orgs promoting more engagement of women in research #mathematics. #WomenInSTEM #WHM

Protein language models are bad at mutational effect prediction blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/protein-la...

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

Russell Vought's OMB is continuing to hold up funds at NIH. www.medpagetoday.com/publichealth...

we are losing so much talent, progress, and hope for no good reason www.vox.com/future-perfe...

This is so cool: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Discovery of a Genetic Toxin-Antidote System in Vertebrates hat tip to @asaflevylab.bsky.social

AI-designed proteins are advancing fast, but how do they perform in real biological systems? Bits to Binders found out…

We were thrilled to synthesize the DNA needed for the competition and extend our congratulations to the teams and organizers on such a fantastic event! Read all the details in the preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... @twistbioscience.com , @kosonocky.bsky.social

Fun new paper out today - a collaboration led by @stephkoe.bsky.social and @ettema.bsky.social found lots of new Euk-like proteins in Asgard Archaea www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What to learn more about the enigmatic organism Prototaxites?? Have a read of our new Quick Guide in @currentbiology.bsky.social It includes another great palaeo-reconstruction of the Rhynie ecosystem from @matt-humpage.bsky.social

Amazing work from Clay @kosonocky.bsky.social, Alex Abel and LEAH labs, and all the collaborators and participants in the Bits2Binders AI CAR-T therapy protein design competition. The results are in! bsky.app/profile/koso...

We have started a project trying to predic the interactions/structures of all yeast protein pairs using an AlphaFold pooling approach. We are making the current dataset open and we welcome collaborations. www.evocellnet.com/2026/03/mapp...

The Bits to Binders competition was created to evaluate AI-driven methods on their ability to create proteins that function in a realistic, cellular context; in this case CD20-targeting binders as Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) binding domains that elicit a CAR-T response

Link to the preprint below! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

In summary, we find that most of the failures seem to have been caused by impaired translation and protein expression. We believe that optimizing sequence-level properties for expression is just as important as the structure-centric task of binding

If we removed seqs with: ≥60% GC and <1.9 DNA entropy ≥45 AA repeats (DNA) ≥8 EE repeats ≥30% K+E alpha helix We would remove 4,600 designs, increase recovery from 57% to 81%, and CD20-specific proliferation from 5.9% to 7.6% while removing 2/3 non-functional top 10 designs

In summary, we have confirmed that at least three teams were able to create broadly functioning CD20-specific immunotherapies using the AI-driven tools of their choice. We gave our awards to these teams and others based on the functional assays released last September.

Team hits rates ranged from 0.6% to a staggering 38.4%! And surprisingly, over half of the designs failed to proliferate in either condition, indicating that the designs interfered with CAR expression.

The results are finally in! 🏆💻🧬 I'm thrilled to announce that the manuscript for the Bits to Binders protein design competition is out on bioRxiv! Here's a summary of our findings, including some simple criteria that nearly *double* success rates when applied as a filter 🧵

We are deeply saddened to share the news of the passing of David Botstein, a towering figure in modern #genetics and a foundational force behind SGD. www.yeastgenome.org/blog/in-memo... #yeast #modelOrganism

I was sad to learn that my postdoctoral mentor, David Botstein, died yesterday. I started with David as a postdoc in 1998, and he had a profound effect on both my life and scientific career. He was a giant in the field of genetics, making seminal contributions in both yeast and human genetics. 1/

This week's cover @thelancet.com

🧬 New IRD gene identified! IOB researchers (@abimoye.bsky.social, @mquinodoz.bsky.social, @carlorivolta.bsky.social) found pathogenic variants in SAXO6 (formerly MDM1) in families with a rare late-onset retinal degeneration. 🔗 www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex... #AcademicBlueSky So what’s SAXO6 doing?

The vault particle is enclosed by a C13-symmetric cap with a positively charged exterior pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41706843/ #cryoem

Beyond thrilled to share that our study has been published! This project encompasses years of work, including my thesis research on Asgard archaea in the @archaeal.bsky.social lab at @utmsi.bsky.social and @texasscience.bsky.social!!! #MicroSky #ArchaeaSky 1/12

One of the biggest questions in biology is how complex cells evolved about 2 billion years ago. Here's my new story on how scientists are solving the mystery of eukaryotes like us. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qMbo22

We are hiring a postdoc! The group has a funded opening to join our amazing team on the NCI's Frederick, MD campus. This is an opportunity to train in cutting-edge chemical & RNA biology methods with a supportive, tight-knit group. Link to posting below. Please share! jobrxiv.org/job/national...

Postdoc position available!!! We are looking for a creative postdoc to develop independent research directions in tissue morphogenesis using embryos, stem cell/organoid systems, and quantitative imaging and/or biophysics. Here are the details: livejohnshopkins-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/person...

Its not cryoEM, but still happy for the shout out @cryoempapers.bsky.social 😆

These are the curves for new and competitive renewal grants. The number of new awards is increasing slightly, but only slightly. 17 out of 25 institutes and centers with funding authority have now made awards. 3/4

“In summary, 2 large, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials in highly relevant populations show that starting metformin at the time of acute infection with SARS-CoV-2 is safe and lowers the risk of developing long COVID.” academic.oup.com/cid/advance-...