Look, plantar fascitis sucks but I think this guy has bigger issues going on

After years of Costco trips,I looked up from checkout to see the littles had found the boxes and spontaneously self-assembled.

For 40 years the 8-nt ‘Kozak Sequence’ was thought to mark sites of translation initiation. In a new study, we revise this model by identifying an ~80-nt sequence—the extended Translation Initiation Sequence (eTIS)— that guides ribosomes to correct start sites. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

“the very prospect of challenging a luminary in the field serves as a deterrent for entry by outsiders. Indeed, most of the entry we see occurs in those fields that lost a star who was especially accomplished.” pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Interesting @chemrxiv.org preprint by the group of @katrinrittinger.bsky.social. They use enantiomeric pairs of covalent inhibitors to profile ligandable cysteines. Interesting use of machine learning to predict new compounds that can add most to the ligandable space. doi.org/10.26434/che...

i dunno man

Please repost! This comes from the good people at ChimeraX, who produce powerful up-to-date software to study protein (etc) structures, which are FREE to the community. 🙏 To stay viable and serve us, they need an experienced structural biologist to assume the leadership role on a funded project.

Congratulations to our Senior Scientists, Drs. Hansen He and Cheryl Arrowsmith for receiving AACR Scientific Achievement Awards in recognition of their outstanding contributions to cancer research. #AACR26

It's really inspiring how Duke brings people together.

A high-affinity split-HaloTag for live-cell protein labeling. And much more. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 Our new paper is out! 🙌 Bioorthogonal reactions often create bulky, non-native linkages-great for labeling, but not ideal for installing natural PTMs. We combine GCE with a chemoselective amide-bond forming reaction to install site-specific acylation PTMs. www.cell.com/chem/fulltex... 1/4

Kids: “Dad that car cut you off!” Me: “He’s harmless.”

We are hiring a postdoc! The group has a funded opening to join our amazing team on the NCI's Frederick, MD campus. This is an opportunity to train in cutting-edge chemical & RNA biology methods with a supportive, tight-knit group. Link to posting below. Please share! jobrxiv.org/job/national...

This is a fascinating paper that reveals defined and clear mechanism for a phenomenon that for some seemed unbelievable- the up regulation of genes paralogous to those with specific types of inactivating mutations. This is called transcriptional adaptation 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

douglas adams was our most accurate futurist

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

3️⃣4️⃣ Robert G. Roeder collecting sea urchings, the organism in which eukaryotic RNA Pols I, II and III were discovered (source : youtu.be/efNtZyXSHC4?...)

😂

"There’s never been a better time to touch the hearts of people, you just have to be human." A wonderful post on my Substack by Freya India, one of the best writers I know, who writes about Gen Z. www.afterbabel.com/p/you-have-t...

"authors also express frustration at the amount of work expected for a single publishable unit, a concern we share (while humbly noting that it may not be held by the same authors when they serve as reviewers of other work)" <-THAT www.nature.com/articles/s41... ht @ritastrack.bsky.social

Biochemist/molecular biologist Joan Steitz was born #OTD in 1941. She (& team) figured out how our cells read/use genetic instructions to make proteins. A key person who helped crack the code on RNA—the molecule that acts like a messenger between DNA & and the proteins our bodies need. #WomenInSTEM

I’ve seen some weird drug molecules over the last 30 years but not many that I’d use as a synthetic intermediate (and store in a sealed vial) #ChemSky #ChemChat (h/t @drughunter.com for the screenshot)

I was late to this just coming out but the crazy idea here is to store transcriptome in Vault particles as a snapshot of the prior gene expression states!!!

this is a fascinating article, featuring a ton of analytical chemists arguing with one another #chemchat

Excited to share our new preprint in collaboration with Paul Cohen's lab at Rockefeller University and Ken Loh's lab at Yale University! We introduce TurboID-TMT for cell type-specific proximity labeling to profile organ secretomes and ER-resident proteomes in vivo. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Greetings! I decided to make a YouTube video of my AlphaFold workshop that I've given a few times in the past year. Caveats aside, people seem to find this useful for thinking about how to model protein interactions and how to interpret various AF outputs 1/2 www.youtube.com/watch?v=u63o...

Magic Johnson was the grand marshal of the Rose Parade today, and as someone who remembers his November 1991 HIV announcement: if you had told anybody that day that he would be alive and healthy 34+ years later, I don't think they would have believed you. Medicine and research—they work.

New post! There was a lot of innovation in medicine and biomedical research this year, and I've tried to summarize the biggest ones in this blogpost. Medical breakthroughs in 2025. Plus a serious note at the end. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br...

What Do Oral Drugs Really Look Like? Dose Regimen, Pharmacokinetics, and Safety of Recently Approved Small-Molecule Oral Drugs

Congratulations former postdoc @jfhevler.bsky.social (in transit to Roche) and the team on their work using thermal proteome profiling along with glycosylation perturbagens to discover glycan-dependent protein functions at the proteome scale 👏 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Excessive vigorous exercise impairs cognitive function through a muscle-derived mitochondrial pretender: Cell Metabolism www.cell.com/cell-metabol...

My wife, who designed our card, completely shares my sense of humor. Happy holidays!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

😬

This “major update to ProteomicsDB” is definitely worth a look. academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

Pilot just came on and said that in addition to turbulence, “We are flying today with an unusually large number of tubes. Please make sure you exit the plane with the correct tube.” Non #SFN25 passengers very confused 😂

For solving a 50-year mystery by uncovering the machinery behind BMP, a molecule with protective effects against various disorders, Uche Medoh is the winner of the 2025 Science & SciLifeLab Prize for Young Scientists. 🎉 Learn more about the work: https://scim.ag/4qVpK1a

Current group mood 🚀 🚀

Every time I open a Capri Sun:

Reading this, it truly resonates how fortunate we were that Jim Watson never took an interest in social media.

Huge congratulations to @craigmcrews.bsky.social on being awarded the #Havinga medal at the #Reedijk Symposium of the Leiden Institute of Chemistry for his groundbreaking work on induced proximity, including targeted protein degradation, as a new paradigm for #DrugDiscovery. #ChemSky #ChemBio #TPD

I think about this post every day 🧪

We have wondered what a complex archaeal cell might look like ever since 2014. It’s been a long road (and the journey is far from over), but it’s a good time to pause for breath and look. These Asgard archaeal cells are a surprise! And that is the joy of being a cell biologist.

Beautiful discovery by the Huber and Kubicek labs and a wonderful example of using targeted protein degradation to probe novel non-catalytic functions.

Bronsted-basic small molecules activate GTP hydrolysis in Ras Q61 mutants https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.04.686643v1

Flying Squirrel Loves It Every Time

Excited to share our latest work in collaboration with the @edreznik.bsky.social lab @mskcancercenter.bsky.social, where we describe functionally dominant mitochondrial DNA mutations in patient tumors. So, what is functional dominance in mitochondrial genetics, I hear you ask? rdcu.be/eN1jm

Required reading for cell biologists to get a sense of basic statistical principles! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Every scientist’s secret aspiration is to make it into this Pubmed alert: