Special issue: The discovery of CENP-A, the centromere-specific histone H3 variant turns 40 years! Sam Corless @scorless.bsky.social and Goks Thangaval @gokilavani.bsky.social are Revisiting the question: When is a centromere not a kinetochore? Check it out. rdcu.be/eMJkd

Left work and 30 sec later it came down hard…but got to see a nice rainbow. Karlsruhe Schlosspark.

Next Tuesday Oct 28, great talks of invited and local speakers of our Synthetic Genomics Center, in Heidelberg and on Zoom!

As promised, a recent painting! “Roja” Oils 16x9 You can still view this one in person (always looks so much better in person!) at @spoke-art.com NY! spoke-art.com/blogs/news/1...

New Tuesday (Oct 28) in Heidelberg and online: kick off event of the Center for Synthetic Genomics: program and link to zoom: www.syn-gen.de/kick-off

My entry for today’s #FluorescenceFriday: a pupal #Drosophila testis with muscles expressing 🔵 lifeact & 🔴 RFP-nls Honored & grateful to receive an honorable mention at @healthcare.nikon.com Nikon Small World 🌍🔬✨ 🔗 www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/20... #NikonSmallWorld #Microscopy #ScienceArt

Come join us in Geneva for everything epigenetics and gene regulation. It will be a great meeting! Please repost! www.keystonesymposia.org/conferences/...

This is 'Rakotzbrücke Devil’s Bridge', commissioned in 1860 in the German village of Kromlau in Gablenz on the estate of Friedrich Herrmann Rötschke, now a public park. Its purpose is ornamental: to form a perfect circle with its own reflection when light & wind permit. (📷: Dirk Förster, Flickr)

An Interview with Azim Surani Ashley Moffett and @geraldinejowett.bsky.social spoke to Azim, recipient of both the 2025 Kyoto Prize and 2026 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, about his non-traditional and inspirational route into academia: journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

A gallery of fireflies.

Last week we were in the Washington Post for our characterization of Robertsonian chromosomes. This week we are entering our 10th day of being shut down and all of our research is on hold. To help me feel not-so-bad, here is a thread of some studies we released right before the shutdown 🧵 [1/n]...

🚂 The T2T train keeps rolling: "The formation and propagation of human Robertsonian chromosomes" with Gerton and Garrison labs is out! What's a Robertsonian chromosome? Let Jen tell you herself in this great video, or read our paper: [1/3] 📺 youtu.be/JmlY5omxQVc 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

It is with great sadness that the University shares the news of the death of Professor Sir John Gurdon, founder of the @gurdoninstitute.bsky.social Read our tribute to the visionary Nobel Laureate and watch an interview from 2012, just after he won: https://bit.ly/4mM8o3r

Thanks to @erhardtlab.bsky.social for the news and views on our paper on DNA methylation&centromere www.nature.com/articles/s41....

I am leaving Rochester NY after attending the retirement fest of four giants in the field of evolutionary biology including my PhD advisor. This visit gave me a chance to revisit old haunts and reflect on my own somewhat unlikely origin story. 1/n

🧪

“It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.” ― Jane Goodall 💙 RIP to a real one. My childhood hero

🧬🌉Online @science.org Megabase-scale human #genome rearrangement with programmable bridge recombinases | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Become my colleague @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social ! 2 Associate Professorships in the areas of - prokaryotic/eukaryotic microbiology - metabolism my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Embryonic signatures of intergenerational epigenetic inheritance across paternal environment & genetic background @jamiehackett.bsky.social et al @embl.org see transcriptome changes in offspring after fertilisation by fathers exposed to gut dysbiosis or western diet www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

War ravaged Portland

Wut

#Jobalert 🚨: Please RT ! Looking for a #PhD student for exciting project on the interphase between epigenetics and cellular metabolism: How do (nuclear) metabolic enzymes reguate chromatin function ? #epigenomics, #epigenetics, #metabolism www.helmholtz-munich.de/en/ife/job-o...

Morning walk

Amazing 2. day at the GfG ‘Epigenetics & Chromatin’ symposium. Fantastic flash talks, a great first poster session and many memorable talks: among others @erhardtlab.bsky.social, @rodvilla.bsky.social, @thebraunlab.bsky.social, @flurylab.bsky.social, Ehrenhofer-Murray, Liefke, Heun, Imhof & Brehm.

Some (+)ve news to lighten another heavy weekend: our latest preprint (c/o Mattiroli + Ramani labs) is up! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A tour-de-force by 1st authors Bruna Eckhardt & @palindromephd.bsky.social, focusing on chromatin replication. RTs welcome; tweetorial in 3,2...(1/n)

NEW: Hours before a new entry ban is supposed to go into effect, the federal government officially acknowledges for the first time that the restrictions do NOT apply to people who currently have H-1B visas. Link: www.uscis.gov/sites/defaul...

Congratulations Needhi 🍸

Congrats to my friends in the Boettiger lab for this really beautiful live imaging work. A big leap forward in understanding the dynamic side of genome organization. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

PIWI clade Argonautes are essential for transposon silencing. Without them, animals are sterile due to massive transposon activity. But how does piRNA-guided target interaction translate into silencing? PhD student Júlia Portell Montserrat has an intriguing answer www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

My favorite experiment: targeted mutations in Piwi in flies that prevent it from binding Gtsf1/Asterix generate a Piwi protein that is loaded with piRNAs, translocates into the nucleus, but is unable to silence transposons, causing full sterility. A mutation we have been dreaming of for years.

🧬DZIF researchers have discovered that #HIV does not randomly integrate into the genome: the virus follows R-loops as signposts, with the enzyme Aquarius enabling the process. These findings open new avenues for potentially curative treatments. @marinalusic.bsky.social @natmicrobiol.nature.com

The BUB1 and BUBR1 paralogs scaffold the kinetochore fibrous corona | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Congratulations @vcmentowski.bsky.social for solving a remarkably challenging molecular puzzle

Excited to share my postdoc work, out on bioRxiv today! Histones package DNA into nucleosomes to form the building blocks of chromatin, but how modular and programmable is this system? 1/9

The Fates

They do know how to 💥 🧨 🎇 🎆 in #Heidelberg

#1 Centromeres are epigenetic loci defined by CENP-A, positioned in unmethylated DNA flanked by highly methylated regions. Our work, published in @natgenet.nature.com in collaboration with @naltemose.bsky.social investigates the role of DNAme at human centromeres www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fantastic opportunity. Vienna rocks!

📅Are you a passionate science communicator with research experience in #devbio or #stemcell biology? Only a couple more days to apply for the Community Manager position at the Node. Deadline: 05 September bit.ly/4m7Fn28

The discussion of this paper is more fun to read than a scifi novel…wild!

The scent of silence! Cool research in Cell @cellpress.bsky.social to brighten up your day🌹. The mystery of why some roses are fragrant and others aren't has an answer. It's called SCREP: a rose-specific gene that evolved from non-coding DNA 16.8 million years ago 👇

🔭 Fishing for the Moon Image Credit & Copyright: Marco Bellelli apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25082...

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... and this!

No brush, no pencil. Just a typewriter. Artist James, using a 1930s Smith Premier typewriter, typed out this painting. #art #printer #unique #typewriter #illustration

Is anyone in continental Europe looking for a lab manager? I have a fabulous candidate - let me know and please RT!

Wow, maybe genomic imprinting as we know it is just the tip of then iceberg. Hopefully this helps usher in a wave of mechanistic studies www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are excited to share our latest work elucidating the structural basis for how augmin binds to microtubules. Out just now @natcomms.nature.com : www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations to the shared first authors @wuertzmartin.bsky.social and Giulia Tonon. Fantastic collaboration with the Schiebel Lab @zmbh.uni-heidelberg.de‬, @fabiololicato.com @bzh-hd.bsky.social, the Eustermann Lab @embl.org, and @erhardtlab.bsky.social @kit.edu. Thanks to all who contributed!

@kasperdhansen.bsky.social, the cover is now online (and pasted in below).