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! ⭐️

Second new preprint ‼️ Work led by brilliant postdoc @alinaemelianova.bsky.social (in collab with Pablo Garcia and Daniel Tan) where we leverage multiscale simulations to predict small-molecule partitioning into condensates 💦💊🙌🏽 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Welcome to the Biological Physics of Biomolecular Condensates: Bridging Theory and Experiment (#biomol-c25) Conference at #KITP Learn more at: buff.ly/HHQAdGh If you are unable to attend in person or want to revisit any talks, recorded sessions are available to watch at: buff.ly/ufXjSxG 🧪

Are stress granules crucibles or protective against amyloid fibril formation? Read about our work at Mol Cell: "Tunable metastability of condensates reconciles their dual roles in amyloid fibril formation". Wonderful collaboration with @rohitpappu68.bsky.social and other colleagues (see next post)!

Lively poster session after a day full of talks (😅) by @drummondlab.bsky.social, Allie Obermeyer, @albertilab-tud.bsky.social, Sam Safran, and @tanjamittag.bsky.social at the #KITP biomol25 conference on biomolecular condensates. Great conversations between theorists and experimentalists!

AP story about the Bethesda Declaration is now up... apnews.com/article/nih-...

I updated my funding curves last night. Here are the results for new and competitive renewal grants. The rate of investment has dropped substantially. This is apparently due to a requirement for DOGE review. I am calling this effect the "Downward DOGE" 1/2

(Longish thread. Apologies) I have met many inspiring colleagues over the past few months, many of whom are in academic institutions targeted by the current administration, and many others who are about to be (the analogy to the ‘eye of Sauron’ has been invoked many times; gallows humor). 1/

Why do so many disease risk variants show no regulatory effects in GTEx and/or other standard eQTL studies? What do we mean when we say a regulatory effect is "context-specific" and how do we define the context? We explored these questions using brain organoids and oxygen stress.

My book, An Intuitive Primer on Effective Functional Genomics Study Design, is published! I’d really appreciate it if you could help spread the word, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. I hope people will find it useful. It’s available on Amazon: tinyurl.com/mx2hewen

I’ve been studying gene regulation in primates for over 20 years, and using RNA-seq since 2008 to compare expression across species. We thought we were being careful. We used curated orthologous exons to minimize alignment bias and focused on biologically meaningful comparisons. We were wrong.

Sad that #RNA2025 is almost over? Join us in August in the UK for another fun meeting on RNA! #RNAsky #RNAdecay

Some fabulous talks today at the meeting on biomolecular condensates at the Carlsberg Academy in Copenhagen. I particularly enjoyed the presentation by Julie Forman-Kay of Univ. Toronto, who explained that the specificity of function and interaction in proteins with intrinsically disordered... /1

You feel bad. But do not think you’re lucky it’s not you. It’s not you *yet*. Call your reps and senators. Push back. We need science. Don’t let them break NIH.

This summer in beautiful Santa Barbara we will run a 3-day conference on “Biological Physics of Biomolecular Condensates: Bridging Theory and Experiment” June 16 to 18th. Register now: www.kitp.ucsb.edu/activities/b...

Delighted to be included in Time magazine's #TIME100HEALTH list - a real illustration of the impact of preprints in biomedical science.

"Kathleen Hall Jamieson believes scientists need to talk about 'convergent evidence' [not] 'scientific consensus'." Smart strategy advice from one of the smartest people I've met www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... via @holdenthorp.bsky.social

It’s out! The evolutionary origins of yeast point centromeres uncovered! “Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hi, everyone! My name is Alex. I'm a microbiologist/cell biologist/biochemist, and I'm sharing some of my career biography today for #YoungScientistNetworking. 1/

Did not realize how much I needed #YoungScientistNetworking But I did. And you do too. Follow along for amazing superhero origin stories

In developing embryos, cells move a lot! Plenty of that movement is random. Is random cell mixing a feature or bug for tissue patterning? Turns out, it’s both! Excited to share the 1st preprint from my postdoc w/ Sean Megason @seanemcgeary.bsky.social and Allon Klein. 1/20 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

It was so much fun to write this review with @usymmons.bsky.social on the conceptual underpinnings of single cell biology!

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

Happy to officially introduce FilaBuster - a strategy for rapid, light-mediated intermediate filament disassembly. Compatible with multiple IF types, modular in design, and precise enough to induce localized filament disassembly in live cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

True or false: quantum mechanics only has a very slight effect on macroscopic systems

My father-in-law, Jack Strominger, and I wrote a letter to the @wsj.com editor about the current threats to science due to Trump's funding freeze. Please repost! www.wsj.com/opinion/scie...

An interesting perspective and framework: #RNA condensates-not individual RNAs-may have acted as replicative units in early life. RNAs in condensate recruit similar RNAs, then the condensate divides once it reaches a critical size. #RNAsky

Translation UK 2025! 30 June - 2 July, Edinburgh! The 30th Translation UK meeting will showcase the latest progress of the diverse UK mRNA translation field. Abstract deadline 30th April. Organised by @biochemsoc.bsky.social www.biochemistry.org/events-and-t...

Jon Lorsch, Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) has apparently been named Acting Deputy Director for Extramural Research at NIH (Mike Lauer's position). Today was his first day...

Whenever anyone says “but hasn’t that been known for 20 years?”, always ask for citations—and read them. They will either be very right or very wrong.

Back again TOMORROW (Thursday April 3rd) for another IDPSeminars! Noon central time - sign up for the webinar here forms.gle/3yCHeYvuuqLh...

Big news: we are setting up a new non-profit organization to run bioRxiv and medRxiv. It's called openRxiv [no it's not a new preprint server; it's dedicated organization to oversee the servers] openrxiv.org 1/n

From an NIH source re. grant terminations "These searches are pulling in things based on 'other support' sections and biosketches, so science may be held up just because someone mentions that they serve on a DEIA committee, or has a completely different grant that uses a 'problematic' word. (cont)

Today we report the directed evolution of HUH into rHUH, a sequence-specific covalent protein tag for RNA labeling. rHUH was hard to engineer: the initial HUH template had no RNA activity, so we started with RNA-DNA hybrids. 30 rounds of selection on the yeast surface were required, and 7 cycles of

We have a winner...