Sure, let's engineer cockroaches to make them MORE indestructible

Rosetta stone for “The extended central dogma of Mol Biol”. Bottom: b-globin 🧬. Middle: b-globin protein🩸. Top: cell types and organs 🫁 ❤️🧠. We understand the gene to protein transition, we are still working out how cell types are formed. Easteregg at the bottom for @matthewcobb.bsky.social #SciArt

Reminds me of this absolute classic

Beautiful videos nicely explaining microtubules! Congratulations to Renaud Chabrier and Casten Janke 👍 www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVbv...

A new retraction for an influential evolutionary biologist is raising the question of whether scientific misconduct more than 20 years ago was just a blip in his impressive publication record or further proof, as some claim, that much of his work rests on a shaky foundation.

My nine year old asked for a Rosetta Stone cake for his birthday

Philipp Rieche, Marten Exterkate, Arnold Driessen et al show that the #lipid divide between #bacteria and #archaea is not as strict as previously thought as bacterial lipid synthesizing enzymes can use both stereo-forms of glycerol-phosphate. #MembraneBiology -> link.springer.com/article/10.1...

This is exactly it. The work is the point.

Today marks 30 years since we identified the apicoplast, a relict plastid in human and animal parasites (PMID 8632819). Apicoplasts are the target of the widely used antimalarial prophylactic doxycycline, which has saved many thousands of malaria infections.

Has there ever been a controlled study comparing the good cop/bad cop method with good cop/bad cop/indifferent cop?

I met a microbiologist yesterday. He was much bigger than I expected.

Essay by André Schneider ( @schneian.bsky.social ) "The controls that got out of control: How failed control experiments paved the way to transformative discoveries" @emboreports.org . https://buff.ly/4i79rZO @unibern.bsky.social

Briefly, we used two fluorescent dyes that were supposed to label newly synthesized cell wall material in bacteria, but found that when we blocked synthesis, one of the two dyes still bound - indicative of a different type of cell wall. 2/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

We would have never published a paper (see thread) if not for a control that delivered a surprise - that I didn’t believe at first and asked Danae to repeat multiple times before realizing she was on to something. 1/

Fun read! Another classic example is Cynthia Kenyon's discovery that loss of the insulin receptor DAF-2 extends lifespan in C. elegans, which came out of the control for a clever mutant screen in which progeny of single F2s are sent into dauer with daf-2(ts) to track lifespan of the parent.

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.” The unknown unknowns are why I LOVE science 🧪

What a great article!

A fun read, unveiling key discoveries revealed because the control "failed" 🧪

A nice reminder to think through _why_ controls failed

This is such a beautiful paper.

Many Thanks - I see you are working with RNA. Then maybe this something for you as well. It is a chimera between science history and formal review "A short history of guide RNAs" file:///Users/Andre/Downloads/embr.202051918.pdf

0/ 💡💡💡Had one of those slightly weird moments reading something today. Two seemingly very different research traditions—starting from opposite directions—appear to be converging on almost the same conclusion about one of biology’s biggest questions: How do genomes generate phenotypes? 👇🧵

1000x linear expansion. Who would have thought this would be possible - From the inventor of the original expansion microscopy - This is absolutely fantastic! - Expansion microscopy is one of the most creative methods I have ever heard of in my 40 years of being a scientist - CONGRATS!

How to determine the proteome of cellular compartments? We established a method to do just that, published n @eLife.bsky.social: SPEx: Compartment-Resolved Proteomics via Expansion Microscopy–Guided Microdissection doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Uncovering the initial response: Intra-mitochondrial surveillance activates the UPRmt: Molecular Cell www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

the hungry observatory

@johanduchene.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social Spent the last hour looking, found ten more apparently manipulated Western blots in Thermo Fisher's antibody verification data (across eight different catalogued products). Thread below. www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...

What he said.

Commiserations to Sir David Attenborough on his 100th birthday, as he is now too old to be allowed to play with LEGO.

GxxxG motifs of the T. brucei mito OM insertase pATOM36 are essential. Similar motifs also occur in its functional analogues: yeast MIM and human MTCH1/2. - Great collaboration between cvb-lab.bsky.social and @schneian.bsky.social. Congratulations to Stephan and Siri. www.jbc.org/article/S002...

Really reading the literature has always given scientists in training a huge advantage. But these days, it seems like a superpower. So many people skim/AI summarize papers, but then you miss out on so much! It's like reading a description of a Van Gogh painting vs. staring at it for 2h.

🎨🔬 Interested in the interface between Art & Science?🎨🔬 Check out my assay "Drawing conclusions" about how doodling and drawing catalyzed my scientific creativity link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Absolutely fantastic!

A COLOSSAL 62 ft long (20 m) hyper-predatory octopus in the Late Cretaceous that could comfortably eat a Mosasaur. I have never wanted a time machine MORE.

Imagine curing diseases by rewriting the code of life!🧬Discover how CRISPR/Cas9, guided by RNA, acts as molecular scissors to precisely edit genomes, for which the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rz-... @snsf.ch @unibe.ch @ethz.ch @nobelprize.org

Listening to In Our Time on #BBCRadio4 discussing Escher, and I'm reminded of this classic from the New Yorker

They should have called it Straight of Schrödinger: it is both open and closed depending on whom you talk to and when.

🆕T. brucei Kozak sequences are unusual, hard to detect, but important for translation regulation - Check out the work conceived💡, carried out🔬and written up ✍️ by Philip Stettler, with only a minor contributions from me and the Polacek group - CONGRATULATIONS🎉👏 academic.oup.com/nar/article-...

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

This is of course hard on the junior and untenured, but not as hard as some seem to think. Is it better for your metees to burn through 5 postdocs so that one lucky one gets a CNS paper, or is it better for all 5 to get respectable, but less glam publications?

Deciding not to submit to CNS is, in part, deciding to be happier doing good science and having a "sucessful" career, as measured by traditional measures. Will chasing glam journals hurt my chances of making full Prof? Who knows? Do I care that much about making full Prof? Not really.

(1/7) How does T. brucei achieve a 140-fold stoichiometric excess of VSG mRNA over upstream ESAGs from a single polycistronic unit? Our latest research in @natmicrobiol.nature.com reveals a mechanism of spatially regulated RNA decay to fine-tune expression of virulence genes

Nice article about cave microbes and the work of people like Hazel Barton from BBC News www.bbc.com/future/artic...

OMG, the passenger riding along!

Congratulations Sebastian!

Hergé

🚨 Postdoc position 🚨 I’m moving back to Switzerland this summer to launch my lab at the University of Zurich and am recruiting a Postdoctoral Fellow (start: late 2026). Details & application: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie.... Please share! 😊

How many mechanistically different protein insertases are there? Maybe fewer than you think! Check out our tale of pATOM36, MIM, MTCH1/2 and YidC in the preprint by Stephan Berger of the Schneider and the Ballmoos Labs. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Vorholt Lab re-created endosymbiosis in the lab: injected bacteria into a fungus and evolved a heritable partnership. Evolution, fast-forwarded. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

This is a beautiful case of how real science happens & serious scientists work. Kudos to both set of authors: “This has been a humbling experience, but one that speaks to the self-correcting nature of the scientific endeavor.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...