Recurring question: how can I review a structure paper when the authors have neither supplied me with the EM volumes, coordinates, nor PDB validation reports? And *should* I even review it? Or just send it back?

Psyched to say that Mike Diamond is talking at our next seminar. THURSDAY 20th Nov. All welcome! World leading #virology not to be missed - just email us for a Zoom link. Please help us with a re-post to get the word out 👍

This stuff is truly fascinating! On my read list.

Evidence from 14 research funding programmes confirms that early winners tend to keep winning (Matthew effect). But the idea that an early setback makes you stronger later doesn’t replicate widely. buff.ly/UEtcRd4

The Center for Microscopy and Image Analysis at the University of Zurich is seeking a new Head: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie... It is super fun to work with them, tons of expertise and cutting edge instrumentation in ❄️🔬 Application deadline: December 15, 2025.

Our lab's paper describing the North American H5N1 epizootic is out now in Nature! So thrilled to have this out, and congratulations to @lambod50.bsky.social for all the fantastic work on this: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

From mosquitoes carrying dengue and chikungunya in Indian Ocean islands to West Nile virus now endemic in parts of Europe, climate change is redrawing the global map of infectious disease. Mail & Guardian coverage our COP30 Report - mg.co.za/the-green-gu...

Special Issue: Macromolecular Assemblies is now live! Explore advances in cryoEM, cryoET, FIB milling, NMR, & AI for structure prediction. Discover cutting-edge insights into the structure & function of biological complexes. #StructuralBiology #CryoEM spkl.io/63324AwAho

That's a nice named day I didn't know of! I wouldn't mind if every day was a World Science Day for Peace and Development.

We figured out flow matching over states that change dimension. With "Branching Flows", the model decides how big things must be! This works wherever flow matching works, with discrete, continuous, and manifold states. We think this will unlock some genuinely new capabilities.

New pre-print out on the stepwise recruitment to membrane of the #autophagy ULK1 complex from the @mito911.bsky.social from @martenslab.bsky.social Ian Ganley @hummerlab.bsky.social @jimhurley.bsky.social labs with the generous support of @asapresearch.parkinsonsroadmap.org doi.org/10.1101/2025...

New paper alert! Scientists in Clemens Plaschka’s lab at the IMP and @juliusbrennecke.bsky.social's lab at @imbavienna.bsky.social solved a decade-old puzzle, uncovering how the information molecule mRNA travels from the cell’s nucleus to its periphery. More: bit.ly/4nHcvys

I wrote some reflections this afternoon about how the discovery of the double helix changed the course of science. Gift link: nyti.ms/4qPS3y6

🧪 🦠 Prefusion structure, evasion and neutralization of HSV-1 glycoprotein B www.nature.com/articles/s41...

James (Jim) Watson, LMB Nobel laureate, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA, has died at the age of 97. www2.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/james-watson... #LMBNews #LMBAlumni

Democracies tend to have lower levels of corruption

An Asgard archaeon with internal membrane compartments Brilliant study led by @fmacleod.bsky.social and Andriko von Kügelgen. Tight collaboration with @buzzbaum.bsky.social and lab. Congrats to all authors! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Mental health risk of doing a PhD, quantitated from Swedish medical records. Based on my experience, Sweden is probably a safer place for PhD students than many other countries. But even here ,there is a worrying correlation... pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41033288/

Out now! Taxonomic expansion and reorganization of Flaviviridae @vasilakislab.bsky.social @grovearmada.bsky.social & co #microsky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Membrane dynamics, repair and disease Keystone symposium this February in Colorado. The real, true, final abstract deadline is tonight so the organizers can start picking the short talks tomorrow! www.keystonesymposia.org/conferences/...

Lessons learned from a Kaggle challenge for particle picking in cryo-electron tomography www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.03.686153v1 #cryoem

This is beautiful!

Just published! We share an open-source workflow to measure membrane thickness from tomograms, including a tutorial with 3D visualizations. We analyze thickness variations across organelles and reflect on where to define a membrane boundary. @becklab.bsky.social #teamtomo rupress.org/jcb/article/...

🧬 Thrilled to share our latest paper in @natmicrobiol.nature.com 📄 A collaboration to give the Flaviviridae (home to Zika, Dengue & HCV) a much-needed taxonomic re-think. Our at-scale AI structure prediction gave a complementary perspective on viral evolution. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Watch Molecules in Motion Subscribe to the RCSB PDB YouTube channel for webinars, molecular animations, and more

Very happy that NWO supports this major upgrade of our national EM infrastructure. It is great that this initiative got broad support all over NL, and it will EMPower fantastic science - looking forward to that! www.uu.nl/en/news/33-m...

Proud co-supervisor of Rupesh @rupeshjayachandran.bsky.social, who has done an amazing job with this story in less than two years in Max's lab!

Our new preprint is out 🥳🥳🥳 Henipaviruses, like Nipah and Hendra, package their genomes inside helical shells built by thousands of nucleoproteins. These nucleocapsids are essential to protect the viral RNA, but how do they ever let the polymerase in to read the sequence? 👇

Happy Halloween

Remembering David Baltimore (1938–2025) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

We have a new preprint for you. Naked mole rats are very long-lived rodents and have increased translational fidelity. Interestingly, 28S ribosomal RNA is split. Here we investigated the structure of the ribosome by single particle cryo-EM. Take a look. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lab’s first paper is out!! We show the first structures of #Asgard #chromatin by #cryo-EM 🧬❄️ Asgard histones form closed and open hypernucleosomes. Closed are conserved across #Archaea, while open resemble eukaryotic H3–H4 octasomes and are Asgard-specific. More here: www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Congrats to @utah.edu's Wes Sundquist on the cool honor. Had a chance to chat with him a few times when I was in college and he just came off as such a smart and humble guy. attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff...

😂

This is it. Word slurry formed into answer-shaped chunks. This is what Sam Altman says is now smarter than we are.

So true for scientists! (I guess Epictetus is more or less paraphrasing Socrates here?)

🎉 Huge congrats to Maya Schuldiner from the Weizmann Institute (Israel) for the 🏅 Otto Warburg Medal 2026! Her work on how proteins find their way to organelles and how these organelles talk to each other has reshaped how we think about cells 🧬✨ #OWM #WeizmannInstitute @elsevierconnect.bsky.social

I’ll say this again: so many mRNA-based phase II trials could be funded with a fraction of the money spent on spicy machine learning (not to mention things like adjuvants etc).

Proud to share a preprint of our paper on how bridge-like lipid transport protein VPS13C senses lysosomal membrane tension in anticipation of membrane lesions to initiate net ER-to-lysosome lipid transfer for efficient lysosomal repair www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Who is whispering "memento mori" in the ears of today's high and mighty (read: billionaires)? Their "I want to live forever Institutes" seem to violate every ethical principle ever uttered.

Happy #WorldPolioDay! Let's hope we see less and less of this virus, even if complete eradication has proven much harder than initially though.

First time posting on Bluesky! 🥳 We discovered a new pilus family in cyanobacteria. The pilin has a novel protein fold that forms a super-tight double-layer tube. Similar gene clusters exist in a few cyanobacterial orders. A great collaboration with John and others! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thanks Petr for presenting this amazing work at cryoNET in Umeå! Congrats Moritz and all other authors!

Mysteries of trafficking of the vRNP segmented genome and assembly of influenza A virus revealed by in situ cryo-ET! 🔗 rdcu.be/eMmct We are very excited that our paper is finally out! 🎉 Big congratulations to Moritz Wachsmuth-Melm and to everyone involved.

warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fa... I am advertising for a PhD position in my group. We'll be investigating how pathogenic RNA viruses replicate in the nucleus. The project will teach cryoEM/ET, virus culture, and in vitro assays. If you're interested reach out and I'd be happy to have a chat.

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory. www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/...

Finally out in print! Long time project with @olexandr.bsky.social and the PHENIX group. Refinement of X-ray and CryoEM structures, using Machine Learned Potentials as the back end to help fitting. This fulfills the old dream of doing QM refinement, but very very cheap www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our colleagues Vinith Kishore and Valentin Debarnot from the @ivandokmanic.bsky.social lab have come up with an amazing deep learning tool for denoising and filling the missing wedge in #cryoET data. I'm pleased to introduce Icecream🍧

Visualizing influenza A virus assembly by in situ cryo-electron tomography www.nature.com/articles/s41...