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-...

It has been two weeks since the unexpected death of Peer Bork, and all of us in his research group are deeply missing him. His scientific vision brought us together as a team, and we are immensely grateful for the time we spent together. 🧵

We have a nice example of convergence in this preprint as well: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40297438/ Branched-chain α-keto acid dehydrogenase complex + two regulators. BCKDK and BCKDK only dicovered with rare variants; PPM1K, DBT and DLD only discovered with common variants. All associated with BCAAs.

New lab preprint - Common and rare variant studies for the same trait identify different genes and here Diederik Laman Trip developed a protein network AI enconding to investigate if traits studied by different approaches converge on the same molecular pathways www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

In patients with melanoma who had surgical removal of tumor, receiving a customized mRNA cancer vaccine increased protection against recurrence by 44% at 2 years when compared to standard therapy. At 5 years, it appears that protection slightly increases to 49%.

Take a minute to guess at what you're looking at.⌛ This is a scanning electron micrograph of rat epithelium ('outer surface') from the bronchial tubes. The round-top cells are goblet cells that secrete mucus, the hairlike projections are ciliated cells which beat to move the mucus... (🔬: Hitachi)

Very sad to hear about the passing of Peer Bork, one of true giants of computational biology www.embl.org/news/embl-an...

📢 The Louis-Jeantet Foundation is happy to announce the 2026 #LouisJeantetPrizes, awarded to YASMINE BELKAID @pasteur.fr and to FIONA DOETSCH @doetschlab.bsky.social hlab.bsky.social @biozentrum.unibas.ch @unibas.ch CONGRATULATIONS!!! 👉 jeantet.ch/en 👇 follow thread

How did eukaryotic cells with complex architecture evolve from simpler prokaryotic cells? DNA analyses offer possible answers @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41... www.nature.com/articles/s41... @bristoluni.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great things still happen all around us. Each your UNC Biology's Bob Goldstein and Art's Beth Grabowski co-teach ARTS/BIOL 409, that brings together artists and scientists to explore an intersection of two disciplines. It culminated this year with a remarkable show Friday 1/n

Human coronavirus 229E antibodies and Spike structure function paper is finally out for real. Led by @wrapplab.bsky.social (wrappers delight) and @mlicc1701.bsky.social (MFL) #lovevirology #229E #antibodies www.nature.com/articles/s42...

NEW article by me! We can now visualize pathogens down to atoms; design vaccines in weeks; manufacture them in microbial factories; engineer them more precise than ever before. We're living through a golden age of vaccine development, but only if we continue to invest in them.

Our Perspective article on Computational Strategies for Cross-Species Knowledge Transfer is now published in @natmethods.nature.com! This was a collab b/w @krishnanlab.bsky.social & @fishevodevogeno.bsky.social, led by the amazing Hao Yuan @yhbioinfo.bsky.social. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New post! There was a lot of innovation in medicine and biomedical research this year, and I've tried to summarize the biggest ones in this blogpost. Medical breakthroughs in 2025. Plus a serious note at the end. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br...

Helene was so giving to others about her battle, and went through to make it into maybe the top 1% of survivors of pancreatic cancer, before succumbing Dec 19, 2025 all while losing her father to it. She supported @letswinpc.org and the family asks for you to consider supporting them as well.💔

Friday we lost a brilliant mind, colleague, and friend to her battle with pancreatic cancer. Those who knew her will remember Helene Andrews-Polymenis for her warmth, generosity and leadership. She will be missed by many. RIP