Announcing cryo-EM heterogeneity challenge #2, now dubbed the 2025 Community-Wide Assessment of Cryo-EM Heterogeneous Reconstruction Algorithms (CAHRA)! Join us for a webinar next Friday (Nov 14th) to learn more. Datasets already posted here: heterogeneity.notion.site/challenge #cryoem

❤️

Zara Weinberg passed away earlier this week. She joined my lab earlier this year when her postdoc lab formally closed. She was a brilliant scientist, supportive mentor, dear friend, avid music fan, rabid believer in public transit, open science champion, and above all just an amazing human.

Can confirm. www.wsj.com/lifestyle/si...

"It's past time to recognize that university administrators aren't going to lead the way out of this, [setting] the stage for leadership... from faculty, staff, & students, [where] most if not all progress in higher ed over the past 100 yrs has occurred." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #AcademicSky

🚨PhD opportunity at the intersection of computation & biology! 🖥️🧬🧪 Ready to tackle complex biological problems with cutting-edge tools? The BMI PhD program @UCSF trains future leaders in comp bio, bioinformatics, & data science. 📢 Info session: 11/6 @ 1 PM PT bmi.ucsf.edu/admissions Learn more👇

It was such an honor for me to work with awesome colleagues Needhi Bhalla and JoAnn Trejo on this important piece 👇

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

**Job Alert** Exciting postdoc position available: theoretical and experimental cryo-EM studies of flexible biomolecules. Competitive salary, collaborative environment at NYSBC and Flatiron Institute. Please share!! and contact: [email protected]

TTPD #8 with @fraserlab.com: Open access, Clear science, Full hearts, Can’t lose! We chat about the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, HHMI open access, the government shutdown, the BEAR, the Nobel Prizes, and The Life of a Showgirl! wankowiczlab.com/2025/10/23/T...

Updated preprint on the roadmap to predicting macromolecular ensembles with @bonomimax.bsky.social! Four key issues: 1) Structural ensembles are defined inconsistently across disciplines. 2) No single experimental technique alone can fully capture structural ensembles arxiv.org/abs/2505.01919

🎓👏 Join us in honoring dean emeritus Larry Marnett, whose five decades of dedication to science, leadership, and mentorship was highlighted during a reunion of 70+ former trainees from around the globe. Read more about this tribute 👉 medschool.vanderbilt.edu/basic-scienc...

Structural biology techniques capture an enormous amount of conformational heterogeneity, which is often lost during the transition from experimental data to deposited models, including how we encode this heterogeneity. @diffuseproject.bsky.social

I spend a lot of time talking to potential grantees about our open science policy. Some field notes here: open.substack.com/pub/seemay/p...

Nominations for the June Almeida award for Mid/Senior-Career Women in Cryo-EM are now open! Submit your nomination via this link www.biophysics.org/awards-fundi... by November 14th to recognize an exceptional woman in our community.

A university that signs the “compact” is one that acknowledges its own inability to compete and succeed based talent and merit. It would signal insecurity and mediocrity to current and future students and faculty. Say no. Recruit the best people, protect their freedom and support their hard work.

A method called PIGEON-FEATHER can unambiguously determine residue-level energies of local unfolding from conventional HX-MS datasets www.nature.com/articles/s41...

www.wsj.com/opinion/dona... 👏

No words

Vanderbilt AAUP press release about the Vanderbilt Faculty Senate voting overwhelmingly to adopt a resolution opposing the President's proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education as an unconstitutional & illegal infringement on rights & freedoms. vanderbiltaaup.org/2025/10/09/v...

👏 👏 👏 orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

The Diffuse Project is looking for an amazing Project Manager to help us achieve our goal of unlocking protein dynamics! Are you a scientist who naturally loves organization, coordination, problem solving and working with a diverse team of scientists & engineers?

TTPD #7 with @fraserlab.com. We chatted about the recent meetings, news, preprint engagement notifications, and the point of rotations. wankowiczlab.com/2025/09/27/T... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0JCB...

TTPD #7 with @fraserlab.com. We chatted about the recent meetings, news, preprint engagement notifications, and the point of rotations. wankowiczlab.com/2025/09/27/T... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0JCB...

With a new collaboration called diffUSE, the @stephanieaw.bsky.social lab is helping to advance our understanding of protein motion, leading to a new paradigm in dynamic structural biology. @vubasicsciences.bsky.social medschool.vanderbilt.edu/basic-scienc...

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Fall beamtime begins! Here is Sarah @andolab.bsky.social ! 😎⚡️ @diffuseproject.bsky.social

A joy we can all agree we need in our lives right now.

🚀 Check out our new preprint on extending the scope of single-particle cryo-EM with 2D template matching! Improved cryo-EM reconstruction of sub-50 kDa complexes using 2D template matching is now available on bioRxiv! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Peak millennial humor.

Structural bioinformatics is incredibly powerful on its own or when paired with theory or experiment. One of the PDB's superpowers isn’t from one structure, but comparing many to uncover folds, binding sites, and subtle conformational shifts. chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...

Why do people think they will get away with lying on their resume?

These statements about corruption in science are egregious lies. Kennedy is a tsunami of anti-science propaganda. This isn’t just a moral injury to scientists, it is downright dangerous. It is devastating that the U.S. Senate is permitting this.

Today, I'm grateful for the podcast The Tortured Proteins Department. Excellent back-and-forth between @fraserlab.com and @stephanieaw.bsky.social. Disclaimer: I've only listened to episode 6; I hope it's not an outlier! 🤪 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

TTPD #6 with @fraserlab.com. We chatted about the recent meetings, latest news, open science, social media, and, of course, the recent engagement. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/e... wankowiczlab.com/2025/08/31/T...

SBGrid's eLife paper received a citation in July from @stephanieaw.bsky.social & @fraserlab.com from University of California, San Francisco in @elife.bsky.social : Expanding automated multiconformer ligand modeling to macrocycles and fragments. Read more here: buff.ly/EnLwk63 #SBGrid

Almost every new lifesaving drug starts with government-funded research. But what happens when that funding is cut? In this Opinion video, meet the scientists who are trying to save the lives of you and your family.

How many more people will be killed by our federal public health officials?

I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪 The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs. That is *pure fantasy*. Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.

Want to get involved, share your ideas, or just stay in the loop with email updates? Let us know here: forms.gle/37pK2smABwbg...

We are thrilled to be part of Project Diffuse, building infrastructure for the dynamic future of structural biology. We are helping to lead the modeling and encoding efforts of this project, including designing infrastructure that allows AI to learn from the full complexity of experimental data.

What’s the next PDB? Maybe it’s …the PDB. We just launched @diffuseproject.bsky.social a structural biology initiative exploring protein motion & rethinking how we generate and use experimental data. Quick 🧵👇 www.diffuse.science

Announcing the Diffuse Project! We're unlocking protein dynamics through diffuse X-ray scattering - the overlooked signal that could revolutionize how we understand protein motion. seemay.substack.com/p/from-syste...

I am all for journal caps but $2000 is too low. As @peiferlabunc.bsky.social said, it costs $ to run a journal.

Read this. www.statnews.com/2025/08/09/c...

Whoever decided airplane power outlets should be hidden behind your legs deserves the design equivalent of a Razzie. Bonus points for forcing me into twisted yoga poses just to charge my computer.

Protein-ligand complexes are all the rage with OpenBind+other efforts launching 3 amazing papers describing 229 protein-ligand structures just dropped in @actacrystd.iucr.org A tremendous teaching text, but I disagree on the discussed potential for misuse. Read more fraserlab.com/2025/07/29/E...

With news that NIH grant success rates are now below 5%, consider the effort that goes into one of these grants (apart from you, who submitted 60 AI-written grants)- why would you put in that much effort knowing your chances are only slightly better than winning a lottery? 1/

When we rebuild US science infrastructure, can we all agree to use the same biosketch/CV?