YAYYYY, Immune systems of choano !!!! Beautiful to see how knowledge about bacterial immune systems illuminate immunology in diverse organisms with the always incredible biochemistry and structural approaches of @kranzuschlab.bsky.social. Wonderful work @yao-li.bsky.social 👏

Super excited for the full data, especially to see which of the over 400 screened binders actually got us the third place 🥳 Shout-out to the organizers for this very cool competition!

🚨The Bits to Binders Competition has concluded!🧬 One year ago we gathered scientists from around the world to design and submit protein binders that cause immune cells to target and eliminate CD20+ tumors Spoiler: They work!

Wishing a happy 83rd birthday to mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck, winner of the 2019 Abel Prize for her work applying gauge theory to four dimensional manifolds. Here is her story! tinyurl.com/ybmvcbpx #WomenInSTEM #MathSky #HistSci 🧮

‼️ Exciting new preprint from a close collaboration with Kylie Walters' group. Our study maps the binding sites of key regulators of the proteasome in situ. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Daily Bruin article about the ~800 frozen grants at UCLA including some from my lab dailybruin.com/2025/08/02/a...

We are excited to share our preprint describing DirectContacts2! Here we develop a machine learning model to discriminate between direct and indirect protein interactions. We use our model to construct a highly accurate wiring diagram of the human cell. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Scientists, please take a moment to comment on these plans to limit animal testing in drug regulation and biomedical research. Use whatever experience you have to make your comments specific to you. The law requires regulators take these comments into account, so it might help. Mine is attached.

This is great! Thank you. Can the SIB help to keep the CASP challenge running?

We will be hosting a mirror site of the CASP data and workflows at @sib.swiss. Operating a redundant site with independent funding is a good idea for important scientific infrastructure, independent from the current funding situation in the US.

Speak up to prevent a major loss for the field. CASP, which helped shaping structural biology including AlphaFold is on the verge of shutting down. NIH funding has lapsed, UC Davis support ends and the core team is being let go. Painfully shortsighted.

Congratulations to Kohl Kato and Pete Cullen and all involved in this tour de force characterising mutations in the Commander complex leading to Ritscher-Schinzel or 3C syndrome. @peterjcullen1.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Advice from NSF: grant proposals can still include outreach, community engagement, and so on. But avoid specifying particular groups

learned that the NSF indirect cost change would not retroactively alter total grant amount. Let’s say you have a funded 100K IDC grant plus 50K overhead. Total grant is 150K. If IDC changed retroactively from 50% to 15% the total grant would still be 150k.

An update on open postdoc positions, in my group and the adjacent group of Howard Ochman, here at UT-Austin. #SymbioSky Mine: insect-bacterial symbiosis with emphasis on intracellular endosymbionts and molecular mechanisms. web.biosci.utexas.edu/moran/contac...

#ASMS2025 is fast approaching, and I'm looking forward to catching up with friends and seeing a lot of great mass spectrometry research. If you’re there, check out my Tuesday talk (TOE 3:10 PM) to learn how BioPlex is enhancing drug discovery!

Very excited that our work describing hu.MAP3.0 is published in @molsystbiol.org. Here we use machine learning to integrate >25k mass spectrometry experiments to place ~70% of human proteins into 15k protein complexes. www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

"punishing campuses by cutting health research funding would destroy the equivalent of one-quarter of annual gross domestic product in the US." jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

hu.MAP3.0: atlas of human protein complexes by integration of >25,000 proteomic experiments #MolSystBiol #MassSpec www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

NIH funding supporting the HMMER and Infernal software projects has been terminated. NIH states that our work, as well as all other federally funded research at Harvard, is of no benefit to the US.

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday 📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

Cutting research investment isn’t fiscally prudent. It’s economically self-defeating. www.forbes.com/sites/johndr...

What a fantastic day of science at FCBIS! @friedlab.bsky.social and I had a blast co-organizing this exciting dive into the chemistry-biology interface—great conversations, amazing energy, and a standout keynote by @edwardmarcotte.bsky.social. Thanks to all who joined us!

Congrats to Stephen Fried & Anthony Leung for putting on a stellar FCBIS 2025. Absolutely wonderful to see NIH fellows present great chembio alongside colleagues from JHU, Delaware, Penn, UMBC and other regional institutions. We needed this! 🦀🧪🦀 @friedlab.bsky.social @leunglab.bsky.social

Love this example. In 1981 John Hopfield received this small $283K NSF grant to study an obscure topic -- artificial neural networks: www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/... The results of this NSF grant are the basis of a multibillion-dollar AI revolution, for which Dr. Hopfield won a Nobel prize last year

The Spencer Foundation is offering rapid response bridge funding for those who lost NSF research grants. www.spencer.org/grant_types/...

📰New paper out in @natcomms.nature.com! We have developed a probabilistic approach that allows for the accurate alignment of multiple networks www.nature.com/articles/s41... Great work by Teresa Lázaro on her first article (of many to come)! Some highlights 👇🏽🧵

🚨. I've been mostly off social media for a bit (mental health) but this is very important!!!!! Please comment and circulate to everyone you know for comments!!!

ACTION ITEM-----ACTION ITEM Implementation of Schedule F This is what a lot of us have been worried about. This allows for many civil service positions to replaced with political appointees. This could include NIH institute directors and even POs. BUT THERE IS A COMMENT PERIOD... 1/n

In today's Nature: "These cutbacks put the entire US research enterprise at risk. For more than 8 decades, the US has stood unrivalled as the world’s leader in scientific discovery and technological innovation. US universities spin off more than 1,100 science-based start-up companies each year.."

www.kut.org/science/2025... Great cast on the importance of science research and the dangers of cutting funding. Highlighting @jbwallingford.bsky.social and @mclellanlab.bsky.social labs at @utaustin.bsky.social

CDC has rejected a request from health officials in Milwaukee for help with a lead poisoning investigation, after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eliminated the agency's response team. Story by @alexander-a-tin.bsky.social www.cbsnews.com/news/milwauk...

I bet you guys have already discussed this one but it was new to me this morning and very very strange. proteomicsnews.blogspot.com/2025/04/prep...

Finally out! Brittney Voigt et al show the shared role of Inppl1a expansion of notochord vacuolated cells and also for hypertrophy of chondorcytes and bone lengthening. @currentbiology.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

Lots of good signs at the Austin #HandsOff protest today, like this 3D model of a cybertruck driving through the US Constitution

Big crowd protesting at the Texas capitol today in Austin #HandsOff

Reach out to your Senators with your concerns and suggestions. HELP committee… www.help.senate.gov/about/members

NEW: Researchers have sued the NIH and HHS, alleging that they have engaged in a "reckless and illegal purge to stamp out NIH-funded research that addresses topics and populations that they disfavor" by terminating hundreds of grants, violating the APA, Fifth Amendment and the Separation of Powers.

BREAKING: We're suing the National Institutes of Health over their politically-motivated purge of research grants. This is an unlawful attack on scientific progress that puts lives at risk.

My to do list today. Fuckin’ A.

Director of the Nat'l Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) was summarily dismissed yesterday. So here's your reminder that birth defects kill twice as many American kids as cancer. But there is no St. Jude's for birth defects. Only the NICHD. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I don’t think the country understands the nuclear bomb that has hit and destroyed Americas future. Our competitiveness globally was threatened - it is now guaranteed to dwindle to irrelevance. The future is based on science and technology. By the time they realize the damage, it will be too late. AR

NEW: The doctor behind breakthrough Parkinson’s research was among the scientists purged from the National Institutes of Health, the US’s leading medical research agency. www.wired.com/story/doctor...

This hasn't gotten much attention—but new National Science Foundation grants have dropped by almost half since Trump took office, an analysis by @davidimiller.bsky.social shows. www.science.org/content/arti... (Story by @policyhound.bsky.social)

So stoked to have a small part in this awesome paper @nature.com on human spina bifida with Jiny Ha, Sangwoo Kim, Joe Gleeson and others. Chanjae Lee did ALL the heavy lifting for the in vivo validations in my lab. this great work was ONLY possible thanks to the NIH! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bloomberg on the layoffs at HHS: "Among the 10,000 people cut on Tuesday, some entire divisions were gutted including groups working on sexually transmitted diseases, environmental health, global health and birth defects." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

These are training grants. 🚨 The Trump administration has launched a war on students and young people studying science. It’s a common thread. Trump is killing student fellowship grants at NIH and NSF, and is killing the NIH and CDC in-house fellows programs.