This is the "SEA SHEEP" (Costasiella kuroshimae) & it took the old axiom: "you are what you eat" VERY literally. It eats algae & rather than just digest them, it harvests the chloroplasts & becomes PHOTOSYNTHETIC. Solar slug! Also, some of its cousins can rip their own heads off.

Online today, the journal version of our ( @nanigrotjahn.bsky.social @attychang.bsky.social @mmedina300kv.bsky.social) manuscript from earlier this year describing membrane thickness measurement in cells with #teamtomo! rupress.org/jcb/article/...

Wecome back UK! The end of Erasmus student exchanges between EU-UK was one of the saddest consequences of Brexit from my point of view. Glad to see that this has been re-enabled!

PDB-101 has highlighted the structural biology of athletics and well-being throughout 2024-2025. What topic should we explore in 2026?

This was *entirely* preventable.

Hopefully as image processing in cryoET advances we can see concomitant improvements in benchmarking and validation - so we don't end up imagining features of cells that aren't there!

pretty unambiguous experience in the replies - something is up!

RELION 5 3D refinement on tomo data often seems to struggle to align objects that old school STA packages handled no problem... does this match everyones experience or is this a me problem?

🤯

Congratulations, Julia Mahamid! Julia Mahamid receives the @dfg.de Leibniz Prize for her work on structural cell biology! #LeibnizPreis

Agree? #philosophy

One review. Many journals. Less redundancy. Check out this conversation with our head Dr. Thomas Lemberger on the vision behind @reviewcommons.org and what it means for authors and journals alike @embopress.org @embo.org www.embo.org/people/revie...

Must be time for my Christmas break because I am clearly hallucinating.

ERC-CoG for microbiologist Barbara Sixt. Umeå microbial research scores again. Congrats, Barbara! www.umu.se/en/news/eu-f...

The EMBO Gold Medal 2025 was awarded to Tanmay Bharat and David Bikard: https://www.embo.org/press-releases/embo-gold-medal-2025-awarded-to-tanmay-bharat-and-david-bikard/ 🧪 At #CellBio2025, the EMBO Gold Medal was handed over to David Bikard in recognition of his pioneering work on #GeneEditing.

Notably, 14 pt size. I think this great idea should be implemented for Swedish grants, without changing the page limit. Would lessen the burden.

📣We are looking for a Project Assistant to join my group at the Wallenberg Center for Molecular Medicine at Umeå University. Join us if you are interested in transposable elements, epigenetics and human brain aging. 🧠🧬 Dont hesitate to reach out with any questions! 📣 umu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

We will announce a #postdoc opening in January. Cryo-ET and virus replication. If you're interested you can DM or email me already now. More info will follow!

Asking for only the top-X best publications on CVs for jobs or grant proposals would focus more on quality than on quantity.

Really happy to see the work (doi.org/10.1038/s414...) published. Here, we show the full-length helical cryo-EM structure of p62/SQSTM1 and first cryo-ET visual of p62 positive structures inside the cell.

Microsecond Time-Resolved Cryo-EM Based on Jet Vitrification pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41332690/ #cryoem

My favourite experiment in the whole study is the negative-stain polyclonal epitope mapping we did using elephant serum, affectionately known in the lab as Ellie-EMPEM 😄

The prestigious Wallenberg Academy Fellow awarded to @maxrenner.bsky.social and to the newest groupleader in my department, Andreas Kohler. Congrats friends! @mbb-umu.bsky.social www.umu.se/en/news/thre...

Makes me think of some university committees I have spent time in...

This past year, science has kept us all on our toes with new outbreaks, new discoveries & new questions. If our work has helped you make sense of the world this year, we hope you’ll consider supporting it. Independent science education matters. Now more than ever!

Honoured to be selected as one of this year’s EMBO Young Investigators! Grateful to my team and colleagues for all their support, and excited about the opportunities this will create for my group and for our work in structural virology. www.embo.org/press-releas...

New York Times article on science funding with some depressing but familiar curves with interactive graphics. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Very cool to see our Umeå colleague and fellow structural virologist raking in a major grant. Congrats @maxrenner.bsky.social ! www.umu.se/en/news/umea...

Science’s 2024 Breakthrough of the Year was lenacapavir, an injectable drug that demonstrated remarkable success at preventing HIV infection with one shot every 6 months. Learn more about last year's #BOTY on #WorldAIDSDay: https://scim.ag/48pk7zZ

Today is #WorldAIDSDay With Lenacapavir or LEN, a new drug WHO recommends to protect people at risk of #HIV instead of taking daily pills, people can now get injections every 6 months. At the time where funding for HIV is limited, this new drug could mean fewer new infections & more lives saved.

The world has lost a giant of virology, molecular biology and science advocacy David Baltimore’s obituary by Stephen Goff www.nature.com/articles/d41...

"Cell la vie!" meeting is back!📅 The French Society for Cell Biology is pleased to announce that the next edition will take place on October 21-23, 2026 in Paris. This year will focus on the needs & challenges to explore the life sciences with an highlight on the role of microscopy. 🔬 Stay tuned!

Farmed pigs weigh as much as all of the world’s whales, orcas, sea otters, seals, and dolphins combined. All the dogs in the world, including pets and feral dogs, weigh as much as all wild mammals on land.

Nanoscale imaging of native symbiotic animal tissue using amultimodal large volume imaging pipeline for cryo-electrontomography https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.30.691379v1

I had missed this paper! Will definitely have a look at it. Congrats, Naoko and all other authors! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Is LLPS the cell biologists' equivalent of the FSC discussions in cryo-EM? Recent threads on here make me think that.

ExoSloNano: multimodal nanogold labels for identification of macromolecules in live cells and cryo-electron tomograms pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41315814/ #cryoem

Explicit description of viral capsid subunit shapes by unfolding dihedrons by Ryuya Toyooka et al. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Out now in Nature Communications: Convergent evolution of viral-like Borg archaeal extrachromosomal elements and giant eukaryotic viruses www.nature.com/articles/s41... @luisvalentin.bsky.social @lingdong-shi.bsky.social @martianmicrobe.bsky.social @mschoelmerich.bsky.social

· #AcademicSky · The European Research Council is launching €7m Plus Grants for ambitious, long‑term research — open to researchers at any career stage but limited to about 30 awards; current ERC grantees and applicants are ineligible, reports @clanicholson.bsky.social.

And the saga continues! Our collaborative work with outstanding Justin Korfhage & Thomas Melia’s lab in PNAS shows that ATG2A transfers triglycerides and does so bidirectionally! An exciting twist in our understanding of lipid transport. Definitely worth a deep read: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper from the @rouxlab.bsky.social on Nature Communications! We study how membrane tension is spatially organized in cells. Using the mechanosensitive probe Flipper-TR to visualize tension across the plasma membrane of adherent cells and to dissect the conditions needed for a gradient to happen

Geologic Core Sample xkcd.com/3171/

📢Astrovirus polyprotein processing is finally uncovered - these viruses use peculiar dual cleavage sites around their protease! Led by a talented PhD student, David Noyvert, this work provides a map of astrovirus genomes. Great collaboration with @emmottlab.bsky.social @leandroxneves.bsky.social

Frikkin amazing stuff.

Ballistic Microscopy (BaM) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41279100/ #cryoem

Each such discovery is a game changer for our understanding of eukaryote evolution, and this paper is no exception. Meet Solarion, which displays yet again novel types of subcellular structures. Congrats to all authors on a fascinating story. #protistsonsky www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Reminder of the importance of flu, if you needed one. I'm intrigued by the difference between some neighbouring countries. Is the difference between Norway and Sweden likely to be due to differences in vaccination programmes?

It’s been a while since I put together the Structural Virology starter pack, and I’m sure some new folks have joined Bluesky since then. There’s still plenty of space to fill, so if you’d like to be added to the list just let me know. #virology #cryoEM go.bsky.app/Qxv95BL