The SerialEM Python interface has been a huge driver of innovation at the hardware-software boundary in cryo-EM: suddenly the scientist with some programming chops can readily implement their ideas 🥰 This looks like a fantastic meeting!

✍️ New article: "How Wolbachia bacteria could help us tackle some of the world’s most neglected tropical diseases"

Happy to announce "Technical Innovations Using #SerialEM: A Community Meeting", a new format of hybrid meeting David Mastronarde and I are organizing in April 2026. For more info, a preliminary list of speakers, pre-registration etc. visit www.nexperion.net/semcm2026

We have a preprint of a book chapter for you: Structural Analysis of Membrane Proteins in Cell-Derived Microvesicles. We describe how to image membrane proteins in mid-sized vesicles using cryo-electron tomography zenodo.org/records/1717...

While limited to books, Google's ngram viewer can (perhaps) be use it to estimate the zenith of various methods in molecular biology. Maybe not accurate, but fun! books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

Since it was published at peak holiday season, I'm taking the liberty to re-introduce our recent review article. We hope it will be a useful overview of RNA virus replication strategies, and how in situ cryo-EM have helped us understand them: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Just a reminder that August is peak school holidays in the UK, but also more broadly in Europe and in Canada. If you schedule conferences during August you exclude a large proportion of people from these regions who have family obligations.

I am delighted to share this preprint describing the structure and transcriptomics analysis of adenovirus D10 - a fantastic collaboration - and a lot of hard work by Kasim and Rosie.

A molecular-resolution look into the near-native architecture of the spinach chloroplast🌱. This one was a long time in the oven, but we're happy to finally share our "version of record". What long-standing debates did we settle? Check back for a short thread🧵 on Monday. #TeamTomo #PlantScience 🧪🧶🧬🔬🌾

This is an absolute tragedy. And completely predictable.

For something different, tried this approach on something on the other end of the spectrum - in situ ribosomes from low SNR 2DTM data. Used the U2OS-grid 9 dataset from EMPIAR-12459 (699 movies; doi.org/10.1016/j.mo...). Blob pick & 2D after denoising gave 12k particles. 2-class HR-HAIR --> 3.3 Å

RFdiffusion3 is here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Uppsala University will remodel their decommissioned particle accelarator, built by Nobel laureate Svedberg, to become a shooting range for the university's new police academy. Hmm, is it just me seeing this as a sign of the times...

Many gems amongst the 2025 Ig Nobel winners: arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Almost makes me wish I was a PhD student again!

New CDC advisers scale back recommendations on MMRV vaccine in young kids www.cidrap.umn.edu/childhood-va...

Rubella was an absolutely devastating disease. Then we crushed it with vaccines.

Well hidden in a small corner of the main building of ETH Zurich, they have made a mini museum for Einstein in his former locker 😍

See you later today :-) (Thursday 18th).

❄️ NEW PRE-PRINT ❄️ Happy to see our latest work online. Here we present a super simple solution to the preferred orientation problem in single particle cryo-EM: the use of ultrasonic excitation during vitrification! Details in the 🧵 below... #cryoEM #structuralbiology

How long until AI-generated human viruses? I mean, I doubt that they would "work", but still.

I'd like to plug an open #PhDposition in another group at Umeå University. Ryo Morimoto is a new PI with extremely exciting and creative projects, and a very nice person to work with. Apply with him to study molecular basis of invertebrate immunity! umu.varbi.com/en/?jobtoken...

Things are happening when it comes to cryo-EM of small proteins!

Another successful approach to the same problem as HR-HAIR! 🤩 I wonder if a combo might be worth a try - use one frequency band to get perfectly centered particles using 2DTM, then re-estimate orientations using HR-HAIR with a non-overlapping frequency band?

Are you ready to lead ground-breaking research in Infection Biochemistry? We are recruiting outstanding scientists to establish research groups based at @cssbhamburg.bsky.social tackling fundamental questions in molecular mechanisms of infection. embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

Improved cryo-EM reconstruction of sub-50 kDa complexes using 2D template matching www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.11.675606v1 #cryoem

I love the kind of papers that I sometimes get from the cryo-EM bot. Hedgehog coronavirus!🦔

"the business incentives driving consumer AI development remain fundamentally misaligned with reducing hallucinations"

We finally wrote up the paper for LocScale-2.0. edu.nl/pvhxv Please try it out. LocScale is evolving & we are actively building in new features and improvements. Your feedback will help us shape the next steps. Code: cryotud.github.io/locscale/ Work by @alok-bharadwaj.bsky.social and Reinier.

This elegant study now showed up in published form in my google scholar. I think I posted it before but why not once more. Nothing beats carefully conducted molecular virology! journals.plos.org/Plospathogen...

David Baltimore, for much of the past three decades, has been one of my most helpful, thoughtful sources. I wrote an obit about his remarkable career, and I included a few of my interactions with him. www.science.org/content/arti...

It seems trendy lately to have visualizations of 3D proteins structures generated by AI. These show very ugly artifacts, akin to AI pictures of humans with the wrong number of fingers. It is really not hard to make a visualization of a random protein structure using free software! #AI-slop

Sounds like he designed the academic carrer path model... (Not that I disagree about the statement as such.)

Another tour-de-force from David Baker's lab : custom DNA-binding miniproteins to target specific DNA sequences for diverse applications in gene regulation and editing. With David, nothing is impossible !

I've also purified ArnA by mistake (who hasn't?). Did mass spec before plunging it though, so never got this nice structure :)

Advanced #cryoEM workflows are easy in #CryoSPARC: use the Low-Level Results Interface to combine upstream extracted particles with downstream pose and CTF information, use a volume result from an intermediate iteration of a refinement to create a mask, and more! guide.cryosparc.com/application-...

EU and Australia open talks on closer research partnership through Horizon Europe poke @katequinlan.bsky.social @merlincrossley.bsky.social @marnieblewitt.bsky.social @joelpmackay.bsky.social @pseudokinase.bsky.social www.openaccessgovernment.org/eu-and-austr...

This year's Lasker Awards went to scientists who studied the wiring diagram of life, a new state of biological matter, and a potent treatment for cystic fibrosis. Here's my story with Gina Kolata. Gift link: nyti.ms/4mZlH1F

Deadline passed now. Thanks to everyone who submitted applications! My first impression, as always, is that I wish we could hire more PhD students. Lots of excellent applicants who deserve a chance to develop as scientists. All applicants will hear from us eventually, so please have some patience.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

🚨 We're hiring, please share! The FMI seeks a tenure-track Group Leader (Assistant Prof) in Structural Biology 🔬 Innovative scientists in genome regulation, RNA metabolism, or protein homeostasis—especially using cutting-edge approaches—apply now at www.fmi.ch/education-ca...

This is a super useful feature. Makes it easy to e.g use orientations from subtracted particles to reconstruct from original particles, revert back to globally aligned orientations after focused refinement and classification, and much more besides - very flexible and worth exploring.

Genetically encoded FerriTag as a specific label for cryo-electron tomography pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40925364/ #cryoem

This looks great. If the data is as clear as the abstract, this is dynamite. On the other hand, what the hell is a Vientovirus?

Interesting concept, which is already implemented in some places: I have a friend in pharma industry where they started something similar to combat zoom fatigue during the pandemic. They call it "respite days" but Meetless Mondays is catchier!

How nice to se a prize awarded for the creation of @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social! It has made a massive difference to the life science community.

Florida plans to nix vaccine mandates. How well do they work? | Science www.science.org/content/arti...

We are hiring-join us!

Who needs #clearing and #expansionmicroscopy?

Legend David Baltimore died yesterday. He understood the way things should work: "the real contribution of MIT is that it doesn't take itself too seriously. It takes ideas seriously, but the people are relatively informal. They are not self-aggrandizing the way academics can be."