Today is the 250th anniversary of Boston’s mass inoculation against smallpox on July 3, 1776. The city was effectively closed to commerce from July through September 1776. The mass immunization effort was cheered as evidence of true independence. Here's how I described it in my book:

Titans of Virology and Vaccinology presents: Dr. Louise Chow, whose electron microscopy work with #adenovirus was instrumental is the discovery of #RNA_splicing. Hear her talk about her career studying #phage, #adenovirus, and #HPV. virologyunmasked.com/louise-chow/

Using spIsoNet to address the preferred-orientation problem in cryoEM reconstructions www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.29.735357v1 #cryoem

📯 Our paper “VPS13C/PARK23 initiates lipid transfer and membrane remodeling for efficient lysosomal repair” out now in Nature Communications rdcu.be/frKmN

🚨 New in @natmicrobiol.nature.com! We reveal how the antibiotic target PBP1b fortifies the E.coli division site against osmotic rupture. Proud this was completed in our independent labs @dmf-unil.bsky.social, with @avettiger.bsky.social. Congratulations to all authors! 🦠❄️🔬 #teamtomo bit.ly/3SCbOg1 👇

Super excited to launch this search for a new endowed professor at the @biozentrum.unibas.ch! Join us to build a research cluster in Climate Biophysics! 🌍🌊🌾🔬🧪 This is a unique opportunity to create a community in Basel🇨🇭working together on this timely topic! ⏳🌡️ Questions? Please reach out! 👩‍🔬👨‍🔬

Ongoing African swine fever transmission in Catalonia's wild boar population sustains risk to the swine sector, Spain https://beaconbio.org/en/report/?reportid=b6b8d083-fc22-47ed-9c4e-9260863c64d3&eventid=bfc25d17-d0b5-483e-aa54-fa9fc984c3ee&utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=social

Dear #cryoem community, does anyone if its possible disable atlas categorization in EPU? And if so, how?

🔥My first (co)first-author paper is out🔥 The surfaces of Gram+ and Gram- bacteria are markedly different from each other. How are phages equipped to breach the Gram+ envelope❓ 💡We report a baseplate structure uniquely adapted to infect Gram+ S. aureus. A 🧵⬇️ 1/8 #phagesky #cryoEM 🧪

Thankfully quarantine for MV Hondius cruise passengers just ended without any new cases, but it is always a good time for Molecule of Month to explore how a family of rodent-borne viruses can cause severe illness in humans...

Sneaky peek of a chapter of Seeing Cells (A comic history of #microscopy) 1/3 🧪🐡🧫🔬

Become our colleague! Reach out if you are curious about the environment here.

Excited to share our new Nature paper published today: Vaccination elicits HIV broadly neutralizing antibodies in primates www.nature.com/articles/s41... A project 14 years in the making with an outstanding team at @lji.bsky.social, @scrippsresearch.bsky.social and many collaborating institutions

Congrats everyone, but especially my department colleague Sjoerd @wanrooij20.bsky.social !

Take a look at this new paper in @science.org Reversible suppression of autophagy in a mouse model reveals neuronal resilience | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

From v0.2.0 MissAlignment now has an inference mode where you can apply the trained models from one dataset to a new dataset to skip training time. I haven't tested it extensively, so double check if the results look decent 😉 The program calls changed slightly, see here: github.com/warpem/miss-...

Why did Springer Nature retract two papers by Max Planck, ~70 years after they were published? Any why were they selling blank PDFs for $40? The answer seems to involve a misbehaving unsupervised algorithm. Because of course it does. 🧪⚛️🔭 www.science.org/content/arti...

Just in time for the weekend, the 2nd beta for our Surface Morphometrics 2.0 release: github.com/GrotjahnLab/.... Beyond the major API change from the first beta (which used for the michigan class!), this one includes a major overhaul of the dual gaussian fitting for thickness and refinement.

📣 New feature 📣 Reviewer3 is now available on bioRxiv! Authors can now opt to get comprehensive AI-powered technical manuscript feedback directly from their Author Area. It's fully opt-in & designed to complement traditional peer review, not replace it. Learn more: openrxiv.org/reviewer3-fe...

What is the best way to distribute the electron dose across your tilt series in cryo ET? Thanks to Maarten Tuijtel, we finally know --> head over to eLife for the publication! doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

I'm worried authors will quickly adapt how they claim novelty in their papers to get good AI-generated scores. I have always loved a beautifully understated paper. Will we see even less of those? 🤔

This is an interesting idea. Since journals are keen to make authors declare when they have used AI, might authors want editors to do the same...?

Welcome to the age of the AImpact factor...

World Cup players don't skip leg day. Conditioning builds muscles, like the muscle tissue shown in David Goodsell's painting at PDB-101

Have you ever seen this iconic image of the Ebola virus, from the first known outbreak in DRC in 1976? An electron microscopic image, it was captured by #CDC 's Fred Murphy, a virological giant and a very kind interviewee. He died yesterday. He will be missed, but his scientific legacy lives on.

As of the turn of the year, the Wallenberg Foundations will be led by a new, broad-based academic leadership team comprising four of Sweden’s most highly qualified academics. The professors: Magnus Berggren, Siv Andersson, Anders Ynnerman, Astrid Söderbergh Widding tinyurl.com/43f5dnc6

Does the proposed AI tool to "score" if papers have glam journal potential complete the circle of the AI parallel universe of scientific publishing?

Cryoelectron tomography of HIV-1 cell-cell transmission conjugates reveals a secluded environment for viral assembly and transfer pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42327053/ #cryoem

A tiny parasite causes disease in around 280 million people every year, yet much of its biology still remains a mystery. Researcher Ellen Bushell is studying the #malaria parasite at the molecular level to identify the genes that play a crucial role in the infection process. #research #medicine

How does a cell remodel the ER membrane into a lipid droplet? Excited to share our new bioRxiv preprint, where we find that regulated opening of the seipin ring defines a functional ER–lipid droplet interface — and identify SMLR1 as a regulator of this transition. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

@qedscience.bsky.social has come up with a really controversial idea - an AI score for scientific impact. This trained score correlates with the impact factor of published preprints and the binning of papers into discrete quality bins accessed by independent scientists. Backlash in 3, 2, 1... (more)

The news about HPV vaccines just keeps getting better. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Getting lost in technical nitpicking was not enough to replicate what the worst human reviewers can do. Happy to announce a decisive further step: QED can now also spit nonsense on manuscript impact

Great to see a formal treatment of the key problem of how to decide how many conformational states one should even attempt to reconstruct from cryoEM data.

*Preprint Alert*: How do we measure resolution when biomolecules won't sit still? 🔬 Estimating it for a static cryo-EM reconstruction is standard. But what about a conformational ensemble? arxiv.org/abs/2606.14449 with the amazing henryhmattingly.bsky.social and @lukeevanshandle.bsky.social #cryoEM

Cryo-ET gives unparalleled views of cellular structures, but targeted sample preparation by cryo-FIB milling has been a constraint. No longer! A new workflow yields close to 100% targeting success for centrioles & other small structures. Read the preprint ⤵️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Cryo-ET is often framed as a tool for in situ protein structure. But what if the real revolution is contextualization? I explore how #teamtomo is redefining what "local" means in organelle biology, revealing membrane states rather than just protein structures. tinyurl.com/localmembrane

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

This is absolutely horrendous. People are destroying the human and scientific endeavor 🧪

You can take a look at a demo tomogram acquired with the xLPP of apo-ferritin on the cryoET data portal here: cryoetdataportal.czscience.com/datasets/10496 Raw data is of course also available for download!

Reinisch's lab work with the Vanni's lab is online in Cell!! Combining cryoEM and MD simulations, we reveal how the bridge-like lipid-transfer protein VPS13A works with the scramblase XK to deliver lipids to plasma membrane and redistribute them across the bilayer. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Goodness me what bollocks. Of both kinds. Neuro- and AI-bollocks. Tell me how the 30 neurons in the lobster‘s stomach do what they do, lads - dig out the “core algorithm” of that and we might be getting somewhere...

I suggest someone write an article about service contract costs called "The Revolution Eats Its Children".

Cryo-EM: the revolution continues doi.org/10.1107/S205...

The world has become much more resilient to disaster events over the last century. In the chart here, you can see estimates of average death rates — measured as the number of deaths per 100,000 people — by decade since the early 20th century.

A paper was submitted with 4 authors. During revision, the *entire* group of 4 original authors was replaced with others during revision. No explanation. The authors *disagree* with the retraction 😅

Not to ignore how upsetting and unethical this is, but there is some dark humor in the western blot GIF, or? To me, it pairs well with a jingle like www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNv2...

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

ATG16L2 creates a VAIL-dedicated heterodimer with ATG16L1 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...