POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

🚨Attention prospective PhD students🚨 Are you interested in molecular mechanisms, RNA viruses, structural biology or biophysics? 🧬🦠🧪 We have THREE fully-funded PhD projects available for October 2026 entry: www.findaphd.com/phds/?Keywor... Please share/repost, and get in touch if you're interested

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk 🎤 If you’ve read this far and still need convincing, please check out our preprint arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 and this infographic: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 10/10

My first invitation to a predatory journal contribution <3 What an honour!

So happy and proud that my great supervisor and mentor Marcus Jahnel is one of those 13 scientists! Congratulations! 🥳

The academic publishing system is so rotten, it must be completely dismantled. Not partially, and not improved. Dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up. When I tell non-academic friends how it all works they stare at me in disbelief. Not only that it exists, but that we still allow it to.

Always shocking to see these kinds of data collected together. "[publishers made]US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024" - That's $12 billion diverted away from actual research or materially supporting the community - these are disgusting numbers.

Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL

Excited to share my first PhD student’s @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social! Tracking 5 dyes simultaneously Kavan Gor @embl.org tracks nascent #RNA folding during #ribosome assembly to correlate structural with functional information on single RNA molecules! Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I´m hiring! Please share 🪴 🧪 🌈

🧵Remember the preprint claiming SARS-CoV-2 has a "synthetic fingerprint"? It said a restriction map was "extremely unlikely to have arisen by random evolution.” I took its claims seriously. The "synthetic fingerprint" hypothesis collapses. My new preprint explains why. arxiv.org/abs/2510.23833

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

What's in yer basement?

3 more days to apply for a PhD position within our training program on biomolecular condensates 👇👇. 12 positions within our a focus from physics and theory to experimental biophysics to biology and medicine/disease.

Dear funding agencies, I know we all want to discover the wonder drug that will cure the horrible diseases, but to do that, we need to invest in basic, unsexy, foundational research on how the systems work. Funding can’t all be drug development. Sincerely, Looking for basic research grants.

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...

AI-generated papers AI-generated peer-review reports AI-generated images AI-grant writing Algorithms to spot promising science I'm very worried, we should all be very worried

here are some helpful steps for academics who are considering creating genAI images to use for lab branding: 1. don't

How do flexible regions of histone chaperones team up to handle histones? Together with Fred Winston’s lab @harvardmed.bsky.social, we reveal new insights in our study just out in Mol Cell. Hats off to James Warner and Vanda Lux @iocbprague.bsky.social for their key contributions! dlvr.it/TNB145

Rainer and I did our last experiment together in the Kraushar Lab @molgen.mpg.de on Sunday - like many such days since our postdocs. Rainer will soon lead a team in the Emmanuelle Charpentier Dept @MPUSP - stay tuned for more!

Amazing!!! 🧪 The 2025 Ig Nobel prize goes to scientists from the @mpipks.bsky.social for discovering a bullet proof version to make the classic pasta alla cacio e pepe! Including a deep understanding of the pasta sauce in terms of phase separation physics 😃 Congrats @gbart.bsky.social et al! Links👇

Love RNA biology? Join us to explore the piRNA pathway with structural and genetic approaches (see 👇👇). PhD student/postdoc position co-supervised by Clemens Plaschka & myself. DM or email us if you’d like to know more! @vbcscitraining.bsky.social @imbavienna.bsky.social @impvienna.bsky.social

This is indeed a unique opportunity for @ec.europa.eu. But to ensure that „excellence thrives where it is enabled, protected & shared“ the % of funded proposals needs to stay the same (or actually increase). Otherwise it’s just a waste of talent.

"Hostility, exclusion and academic bullying should be formally recognised as research integrity issues because they directly impact who gets to succeed and whose voices are silenced." By @maddipow.bsky.social

Health misinformation and disinformation are the biggest and most under prioritized threats to public health in the 21st century. They are eroding decades of progress in the control and spread of diseases in real time. If we do not address this like the existential threat it is, we risk everything!

My Friday night hot take is that replication studies are largely a waste of time & $ If a result is worth following up on, it's better to address from a different angle & see if it holds water. Strong ideas withstand this Conversely, there R infinite ways a replication can fail that teach you zip

"...if we deploy LLM assistants in decision-making roles... they will implicitly favor LLM-based AI agents and LLM-assisted humans over ordinary humans" Translation: Use the product, or the product will discriminate against you. Great

You hear stories about what an academic household does to children but today at bedtime my precocious rising kindergartner said “father will you read me a story about university leaders who believe LLM-based chatbots have made language teaching irrelevant?” and fortunately I had just the thing

The goal of a PhD is not to learn some facts or read a few papers or learn a bunch of techniques. The goal of a PhD is to learn independence, problem solving, how to finish things you start, resilience, & gain the ability to adapt & think creatively. Learning these things is hard.

Looks like private funders, HHMI,CZI etc., are not going to “save” US research. Europe is setting up mechanisms to attract US researchers & it may work. But, common, target junior talent, don’t shower money on superstars who will be flying professors & return to US when the science winter passes.

PhD level knowledge of geography right here. Who would not immediately want this in control of literally every aspect of their life

It's incredible that all of the people who would shit on Wikipedia as a source because "lol anyone can edit that" are now 100% reliant on asking questions to the lying robot machine that no human has any oversight over

AI is a wonder technology that is going to change every industry, which is why - people have to be forced to use it - people have to be tricked into paying for it - people who do use it on purpose have to hide it from their peers to avoid being mocked

Imagine this at scale, unchecked: how is this not a fundamental threat to science? (Also, this is a perfect example of how irrational and ironic it is for large publishing companies to use “AI” to generate content that is of a much lower quality than the human-created content they already own.)

New preprint alert! 🚨👇 I'm delighted to share the latest research from @jemmabetts.bsky.social in our group: ‘A new protein-dependent riboswitch activates ribosomal frameshifting’. Huge congratulations to Jemma for the first manuscript of her PhD! ✨ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

You know what emergent tech of the last decade actually works well, and was adopted by millions? 3D printing. It’s great! So many applications. But also nobody is sneering at you for not having or utilizing 3D printing. Nobody is trying to sneak a 3D printer into your garage without your consent

Congrats to Gianluca Prezza (@gprezza.bsky.social) for reveiving the 2025 PhD Award from the Friends of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI)!👏 The award honours excellent PhD theses from the field of life sciences at HZI partner universities. His thesis focused Bacteroides' RNA biology.

Hot off the press, our latest review of RNA-lipid interactions -> The secret life of RNA and lipids: "There is no life without RNA or lipids. But could there be life with only RNA and lipids?" @tcjea.bsky.social @bcube-tud.bsky.social be-tud.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

If you don’t have time to take a walk, then you don’t have time to do science. Charles Darwin would take two walks every day on his "thinking path", not as a break from science, but as a crucial part of it.

It was a great pleasure to talk about my postdoc project at the 2nd Polish RNA biology meeting in Poznan! So many new #RNA enthusiastic people I met there 🍺🧬kudos to the organizers 👌I am looking forward to coming again in two years! 😎

Did the #tcteac start a new precedent for other conferences with its police episode? 🤔😅

I've been awarded a SONATA grant from NCN National Science Centre to explore RNA biology in Bacteroides fragilis 🧬🦠. This project will kickstart the Ryan Lab at the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics Polish Academy of Sciences! Grateful for the support and excited for the journey ahead 💪!

Excited to share our latest work out in @pnas.org! We show that the #SARSCoV2 nucleocapsid protein directly prevents DNA recognition of the immune sensor #cGAS by competing for DNA, which may delay early innate immune responses during infection. www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.... #innateimmunity

So there’s a TikTok video where a woman says “Why do I have tattoos? Because life is hard, and I deserve stickers.” And you know what? Yes. That is exactly it. Excuse me while I ponder my next sticker…

I'm thrilled and honoured to receive the 2025 Lister Prize, along with seven other fantastic biomedical scientists 🔬🦠🧬 This award will enable us to determine high-resolution structures of viral protein synthesis inside infected cells

I am surrounded by people who are outsourcing their own thinking to ChatGPT and they are quickly and obviously becoming dependent on it for even the most banal tasks. Once again, the "figuring it out" is the important part. Yes, you can use a crane to lift weights but you will not get stronger

Bacteroides Theta-Iota-Omicron is polymorphic already in its name. What are the differences between the morphotypes? We tried to answer this with a combination of mechanical separation of cells based on their shape and an ultra-low input RNA-seq protocol. Paper from @elisebor.bsky.social here 👇

JOB OPENING for biochemist/-physicst 🧑‍🔬: This isn't an official job ad yet. We are looking for a postdoc working on large to high throughout single-molecule FRET on protein structures and dynamics. The project will be run in our lab and co-directed jointly with a team from big pharma/biotech. 1/2

Excited to share my PhD work! We used a low-input RNA-seq protocol to dig into what drives cell shape differences in Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron. Congrats and big thanks to all co-authors 🧫🧬.