New preprint with @pyjiang.bsky.social and @kelleyharris.bsky.social! The discovery and patterns of the underlying long-standing mild-effect mutator alleles in S. cerevisiae populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our review on the physics of phase separation in cells has been published by Rep. Prog. Phys. 🎉 doi.org/10.1088/1361... We hope that the text and citations are helpful for anyone interested in physical descriptions of condensates in cells!

Hot off the press! Our latest paper led by @fernpizza.bsky.social, understanding how plasmids evolve inside cells. These small, self-replicating DNA circles live inside bacteria and carry antibiotic resistance genes, but also compete with one another to replicate. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

(2/10) We found that disparate drivers of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) – including NPM1c, KMT2A-r, and nucleoporin oncofusions – form nuclear condensates with a shared set of proteins including XPO1 and MENIN to drive leukemic gene expression (e.g. HOXA). www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

(1/10) How do diverse leukemia mutations converge on the same molecular program? In #RibackLab first manuscript @cp-cell.bsky.social, collaboration with @goodell-lab.bsky.social shows that disparate mutations rewire shared protein networks to form nuclear condensates called C-bodies.

My department at UT Austin is looking to hire an Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Biology, broadly defined. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions you may have. apply.interfolio.com/177547

Happy that our paper just got accepted. Also happy that it's been available as a preprint for more than 1.5 years on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social, updated 3x with new experiments, with >7,500 full-text downloads and 20 citations. Before publication. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A wonderful collaboration between my lab and Andy Ellington and Edward Marcotte here at UT. We obtained lots of thermal stable plastic degrading enzymes from the deep sea (Guaymas Basin, Gulf of California)

Please read the thoughtful Blog that @richardsever.bsky.social and the @openrxiv.bsky.social team wrote on integrating pre-prints with AI review openrxiv.org/enabling-rev...

Excited to launch an openRxiv partnership with the scientist-run AI review service qed (@qedscience.bsky.social), the brainchild of @odedrechavi.bsky.social 1/n openrxiv.org/enabling-rev...

Slightly less snarkily, manuscript review culture varies a lot. If a person trained in GlamHoundery reviews for a real journal they often are slightly out of step in their demands. So an important editorial function is to enforce the culture of their journal. By saying “nah don’t do all that”.

As an author, I frequently encounter reviewers who should be overruled -- gatekeepers. My main complaint is has been that many editors do not have the confidence/expertise to do so (but some do). a) Thank goodness for preprints, b) I review with the expectation that the paper will be published.

“It’s too easy to be swamped by a short-term political and social environment.” Neil Shubin tells “Babbage” why he remains optimistic about science in America

More pictures of the brilliance that is (lab manager) Aida de la Cruz with her creation.

Our photoswitchable HaloTag is out in Angewandte Chemie @angewandtechemie.bsky.social ! We now also show that this system can be used to control emitter density in SMLM. Congrats to Franzi, Bego, and our amazing collaborators. Check it out: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Why do complex traits differ in their genetic architecture? In our new PLOS Biology paper, we will try to convince you that two simple scaling laws drive differences in the number, effect sizes and frequencies of causal variants affecting complex traits. Thread: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

At this point, I'm just writing grants as a matter of personal artistic expression. I don't expect anything to come of it.

Thoughts from our own Tom Rapoport on the role of basic science in curing disease. magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/rev...

NIH Study Sections are on hold...again. drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2025/10/13/n...

My HPLC was definitely overlooked www.nature.com/articles/d41...

AI in biology: "I read about some new computational method...get excited because it’s exactly what I need...I try the method...Most of the time things don’t work...I have seen this play out so many times my default assumption is nothing is going to work" blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

"Lacking even any particularly useful theory of emergence, and confronted with the obvious wild variety of emergent phenomena, it seems likely that predictive theories of biology are unknowably far off" via @dadrummond.art open.substack.com/pub/clauswil...

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Very insightful reconsideration what Stress Granules might actually be good for! Going back to the fundamentals & questions arising from Susan Lindquist's and Nancy Kedersha's work. Amazing talk & scholarship by @drummondlab.bsky.social! youtu.be/caAPToh8v0Q

Humbled to announce that we received a New Innovator award. I thank the NIH’s civil servants for their hard work during a stressful funding cycle. I thank the leadership (and chair, Marc Diamond) at UTSW for betting on my lab’s high risk, high reward research. www.utsouthwestern.edu/newsroom/art...

Reposting, submit soon!

The most important paper in evolutionary biology I'd never heard of: 1/ www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

UChicago Microbiology is searching for tenured or tenure-track faculty working in host-pathogens interactions, viral and bacterial pathogenesis, and emerging infectious diseases. Come join our vibrant Department! microbiology.uchicago.edu Apply here apply.interfolio.com/174404

Dear #microbiology and #immunology community- I took a break from social media after I deleted my Twitter account, but am back here. Please help me rebuild my community by following me and amplifying this message- I will follow you back. Thank you and I look forward to our many interactions!

Job alert ‼️ UChicago Micro is hiring! Open to tenured/tenure track faculty at all levels in any area of microbiology. Come join our amazing and growing department. apply.interfolio.com/174404

Without McdAB, CryoET shows large and disorganized aggregates of carboxysome components at the cell poles. By contrast, McdAB-expressing cells displayed fully assembled, properly sized, and unclustered carboxysomes distributed across the nucleoid region of the cell!

Out now in #ACSMacroLett: we demonstrate how molecular charge asymmetry can control the size of condensates! Work done in collaboration with @zwickergroup.bsky.social!! Theory led by Chengjie Luo and simulations by @nathanieldhess.bsky.social!! pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

A strong statement from the Dartmouth President regarding the "Compact" president.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/10... 1/2

Translation landscape of stress granules | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Last week, Washington University made the perhaps questionable decision to award me tenure.

Preprint! Inspired by condensates that form on specific DNA, we ask: can we design multicomponent fluids to form distinct condensates on diff. surfaces? i.e. perform classification by condensation ⚛️ 💻 exploiting phase transitions beyond compartmentalization! arxiv.org/abs/2509.08100 (1/2)

New in @pnas.org with @gladfelterlab.bsky.social @sneadlab.bsky.social ! 📢 Cells use condensates (dynamic compartments without membranes) to organize key reactions. Some condensates have core & shell layers… but how do such layers form? 🤔 👉 pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2504778122 (1/6)

I really enjoyed this interview for The Giant's Shoulder with the very smart Evan McGloughlin. We cover everything from brain organoids to quantum mechanics to agency, and beyond. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNbG...

At the same time, we made thousands of synonymous mutations in endogenous yeast genes and measured their growth. We used careful statistics and controls. Only 3%, 204 of 6874, had a fitness effect! This goes against a controversial recent result that most synonymous mutations had fitness effects.

Hot damn. The @elowitzlab.bsky.social does it again!

This preprint from Helen Sakharova is one of the coolest things to come out of my lab: “Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice.” Codon choice is a big puzzle in how information is encoded in genomes, and we have a new angle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

BIG NEWS: “Senate appropriators on Thursday approved an FY26 Labor-HHS bill that included a slight bump in funding for the NIH, with a strong 26–3 bipartisan vote.” Thank you to members of the Senate Appropriations Committee on both sides of the aisle! www.axios.com/pro/health-c...

Senate committee endorses NIH budget increase, rebuking Trump administration’s proposed 40% cut www.statnews.com/2025/07/31/n...

Very excited to share our new work on gastruloids by the incredible Cat Triandafillou! We mapped gene expression across 26 individual gastruloids at single-cell resolution and discovered some pretty amazing patterns about how these "mini-embryos" organize themselves. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Some personal news…

Some thoughts on the performance of current AI models in a research setting. open.substack.com/pub/clauswil...

AlphaFold is great, but contrary to public opinion it has not completely solved the protein folding problem. Much work remains to be done. clauswilke.substack.com/p/no-alphafo...

Just returned home from the Molecular Mechanisms in Evolution GRC. Felt like injecting Hope straight into my veins. Maintaining these communities is going to be more important than ever in the years ahead.

Saw Tanja discuss this work at #KITP Condensates…breathtaking, one of the most clarifying studies I have seen in what can often be a murky business. Kudos to the authors! ⭐️