Another cool story from our amazing neighbours!

Some antibodies against Adenovirus pVII cross-react to platelet protein PF4, and the pathogenic autoantibodies all carry light chain K31E or K31D somatic hypermutation. So only individuals who expand one particular clonotype, and one specific SHM, during their response to AdV infection were at risk.

If you missed Alice-Roza Eruera's January webinar on Building CryoET Training Workflows Using the SBGrid Ecosystem, you can now find it on our YouTube channel. Here: buff.ly/CPcy0Nz #SBGrid #Webinars #ScienceMatters

The Wallenberg foundation published a very nice background article in relation to the grant we got last year. Thanks authors Elin and Maxwell, and photographer Johan for a great job! kaw.wallenberg.org/en/research/...

Cool feature! It seems I am in the outskirts of the bluesky galaxy:

📢Job alert📢 @uniheidelberg.bsky.social has an opening for a full W3-position on “Modeling of Biological Processes” 😀👍 Here is the call tinyurl.com/3w9e9dtf and application deadline is March 15. The group would be located at the beautiful #BioQuant center right in the middle of Neuenheimer Feld.

He made beer that’s also a vaccine. Now controversy is brewing A scientist’s unconventional project illustrates many challenges in developing new vaccines

Robust quality assessment of cryo-EM maps, tomograms and micrographs by statistics-based local resolution estimation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.03.703505v1

Looking for adventure? Start your rabbit hole with a truly random Wikipedia article ⬇️ No algorithm needed. One click sends you anywhere – from obscure villages to species of frogs. Experience serendipity without algorithms. Start your random adventure ➡️ w.wiki/_2n

Serious side effects dim hopes for the first chikungunya vaccine www.science.org/content/arti...

Amen.

I miss these pieces so much...sigh...

Excited to share our work on #AncientRNA from alcohol-preserved lungs, recovering the oldest human RNA virus genome (an 18th-century rhinovirus). Our study shows that viral RNA remnants persist in centuries-old tissue, opening new ways to study virus evolution and historical disease #Paleovirology🫁🦠

Are you a cell biologist who secretly thinks cellular cryo-electron tomography is just George Palade-era EM, but fancier? Join this webinar to see how modern #teamtomo has shifted from pretty pictures to quantitative, local membrane biology, and how that changes the questions we can ask.

Am I the only one increasingly annoyed by cryo-EM papers not showing *any* experimental density in figures? Sometimes not even in the supplementary material??

Build a paper model of dengue virus for WHO's World Neglected Tropical Diseases Day on January 30 #WorldNTDDay pdb101.rcsb.org/lear... More on dengue at Molecule of the Month: pdb101.rcsb.org/motm...#WorldNTDDay

“ok so this is embarrassing but just for the record and just so we have it, your C.V says "Nature Scientific Reports"? sorry to have to even ask”

Now out in Nature! We visualize infection of the RNA virus RSV in real-time with single-vRNP resolution to understand how RSV establishes viral factories, biomolecular condensates that act as sites of viral replication. A huge collaborative effort led by Dhanushika Ratnayake! rdcu.be/e1bBW

Sartre said something for scientists to think about:

January is Cervical Cancer Awareness Month Visit PDB-101 to learn how the capsid protein of papillomavirus is used in vaccines that prevent cervical cancer

🚀 CryoSPARC v5.0 BETA is here! We’re excited to deploy another major #CryoSPARC release to help enable and accelerate #cryoEM data analysis. v5 has a redesigned underlying software system and many new features - highlights in thread! Full changelog: cryosparc.com/updates/v5.0.0

New on the CryoET Data Portal: ~27,000 tomograms of affinity-captured lysosomes from HEK293T cells across 4 physiological states. Includes raw data, AreTomo3 reconstructions & Membrain-Seg annotations. Openly available for reuse! cryoetdataportal.czscience.com/depositions/...

Our third installment on prefusion stabilization of herpesvirus gB proteins is available as a preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202.... A great collaboration with colleagues at Merck. Our prefusion HSV-2 gB protein adopts a more closed conformation than has been observed for HSV-1 gB in recent papers.

My definition of HUGE cryo-ET data set just shifted by an order of magnitude: 13,694 tilt series! cryoetdataportal.czscience.com/depositions/...

Given the hollow cage-like structures of ROOL and GOLLD complexes, researchers suggest that they may act as structural scaffolds within the cell, helping to sequester or compartmentalize cellular components. More at Molecule of the Month: pdb101.rcsb.org/motm...

And now out in Nature Comms (congrats Wyatt et al.): www.nature.com/articles/s41....

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

Reminder with <2 weeks to deadline:

Jane changed how I both think about and teach biochemistry.

Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.

Cryo-EM structure reveals how influenza A virus NEP binds the viral polymerase at a regulatory hotspot, coordinating RNA synthesis and nuclear export. Fantastic collaboration with @loiccarrique.bsky.social and Jon Grimes. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I am super happy to share this paper in its final form. We used FIB milling to "dig in to" cell lines and mouse brains infected with tick-borne flaviviruses, followed by cryo-ET to study the virus replication. It's open access, so have a look! #virology #teamtomo www.nature.com/articles/s41...

NO.NO.NO

The US withdrawal from #WHO became official today, leaving the world less prepared for dangerous disease outbreaks. “When that will bite us in the ass, it’s impossible to predict. But there is a 100% certainty that it will bite us in the ass,” one expert told me. www.statnews.com/2026/01/22/u...

We are running the cryo-ET image processing workshop again this year! Come learn everything tomo: STA, segmentation, heterogeneity analysis from @baradlab.com @williamnwan.bsky.social and others! Apply!

Amazing sob story: "ChatGPT deleted all the work I hadn't done" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Globally, seasonal influenza kills an average of 700,000 people each year from respiratory disease or cardiovascular disease. During large flu pandemics, when influenza strains evolved substantially, the death toll was even higher.

Beautiful infographic on a sad topic.

The Species Declared Extinct in 2025 My annual look back is, of course, heartbreaking -- but it's also a reminder and encouragement that we can do more to prevent future extinctions: therevelator.org/extinct-2025/

I never imagined I'd be writing this, but I am happy to share that, starting this June, I will be joining @cuanschutz.bsky.social @cu-bmg.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor.

Interested in high containment work on viruses? We have an opening at the Pirbright Institute, working on high consequence viruses of livestock and humans in the core CL3 team. isw.changeworknow.co.uk/pirbright/vm...

We wanted to build the ASU of an adenovirus using ModelAngelo, but accidentally used the full capsid map. It is ~95 nm in diameter and ~80 MDa. ModelAngelo built it! Biggest PDF file ever? :) Cool software, thanks @kjamali.bsky.social and @sjorsscheres.bsky.social!

LLOMe has long been used to study lysosomal damage, yet how it works has remained a mystery. Using cryo-electron tomography, we show it forms amyloid structures inside lysosomes that mechanically rupture membranes – revealing a new paradigm for lysosomal failure. 🔗 doi.org/10.64898/202... #CryoET

Just got this in the mail from @addgene.bsky.social, recognizing that 100+ labs have now ordered our anti-FLAG-M2 plasmids via their service. @mfpronker.bsky.social www.addgene.org/Joost_Snijder/ pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Our new paper is out in Nature 🎉. We show that m1Ψ in mRNA vaccines doesn’t just quiet immunity, it also directly enhance translation by reshaping ribosome dynamics in a sequence-dependent way 🧬 Full paper : rdcu.be/eY5gx

This photo was taken in 1911 using glass plate technology by Herbert Ponting who was part of Scott's Antarctic expedition, The composition and detail are exquisite with the band of white snow/ice creating a perfect frame around the two people and the ship in the distance Iconic imo

Lenacapavir-induced capsid damage uncovers HIV-1 genomes emanating from nuclear speckles link.springer.com/article/10.1...

We are very excited to see this work out in its final form at Ultramicroscopy! Knife edge measurements of beam shapes and improved scanned versus shaped beam material removal comparisons. Find the OA article here: doi.org/10.1016/j.ul...

I love that !