With a few days since it's been out @keribackus.bsky.social @oligopain.bsky.social and I wanted to highlight a few of our favorite aspects of POCA for photocatalytic proximity labeling of DNA, RNA or proteins. (1) POCA builds on standard in situ hybridization and immunofluorescence workflows.

Super excited to launch POCAxOMAP with @dschweppe.bsky.social and @oligopain.bsky.social and led by Eli Biletch, Conor Herlihy and Lidan Li. If you’ve ever wanted to do proximity labeling on DNA, RNA, or protein without genetic engineering, look no further. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Congrats to all award recipients and special recognition to our lab’s own Caroline Canavan!

Super excited that our SEE-CITE photoaffinity labeling method is now out in @natchem.nature.com rdcu.be/ffBSC. Here we introduce a custom silyl ether cleavable linker between a diazirine photocrosslinker handle and molecules of interest to streamline site-of-labeling analysis for PAL chemoproteomics

The next iteration of O-MAP targeting genomic loci is now at eLife!! DNA O-MAP enables proximity labeling at specific DNA loci took a ton of work from many lab members and collaborators, so it's really exciting to wrap up this paper with @oligopain.bsky.social! elifesciences.org/articles/102...

Excited to share our new paper and lipid- and protein-directed photocatalytic labeling method (POCA) just out in @natchembio.nature.com. tinyurl.com/2kcxuvvv. Big congrats to first author Andrew Becker and the whole team for launching our lab into the wild world of singlet oxygen interactomics.

New paper in @jcb.org! We found a new regulator of p62 phase separation, autophagy, and antioxidant signaling. It is an E3 ligase adaptor called SHKBP1, but the effect is via direct p62 binding, not ubiquitination. Congrats to Lin Luan & team! @weillinstitute.bsky.social

LipoID profiles lipid droplet interactions and identifies interorganelle regulators www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How can we study target engagement and selectivity of covalent inhibitors? Which electrophilic probes are best suited to study a certain amino acid? Our study on "Profiling the proteome-wide selectivity of diverse electrophiles" is published in Nature Chemistry.(1/7) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Real-time API control of mass specs has been hard to get started (C#, VS, etc). Mike Hoopmann's recent work makes dev easier & more open!: Nova - lightweight dev library schweppelab.github.io/Nova/ pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.... Helios - a unified instrument API now @ JPR github.com/SchweppeLab/...

Congratulations to my great friend and colleague @bradylabupenn.bsky.social for this well deserved award! @pennmedcso.bsky.social @penncancer.bsky.social

🚨 Save the date! 🚨 2nd LA Mass Spec Day: Oct 17, 2025 @ UCLA South Bay 🎉 Talks, posters, networking + plenaries by Jennifer Van Eyk & Melissa Hoffman! Register 👉 forms.gle/e6A9XWxiRF6K... Submit abstracts 👉 forms.gle/RCf5v3Gab5V8... More info to follow soon

Daily Bruin article about the ~800 frozen grants at UCLA including some from my lab dailybruin.com/2025/08/02/a...

Suspension of all grants to UCLA www.latimes.com/california/s...

Consider signing the letter to support NIH and the "Bethesda Declaration" (www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...) #ASMS2025 @asms.org

ASSIGNMENT: COMMENT ON SCHEDULE F 1 week left to comment about Schedule F, potentially making NIH institute and center director essentially political appointees. www.regulations.gov/commenton/OP... 1/n

Join @lindsaykpino.com, me, and our amazing panelists for the #ASMS2025 #Chemoproteomics workshop on Monday!

Anyone else notice that ART is now giving different study section assignments compared to earlier in the week? Same title and abstract last night and today, different strong and possible matches...?

We will be hosting the 2025 ONO Pharma Foundation Annual Symposium on June 23 at the Royal Sonesta Boston. This event offers an opportunity to explore the latest breakthroughs presented by ONO INITIATIVE awardees and to discuss groundbreaking science in chemical biology. (1/2)

New paper from our lab joint with Val Arboleda @val-arboleda.bsky.social

The 13th General Meeting of the International Proteolysis Society will be held in Búsios, Brazil Oct 26-30, 2025. Training workshops will be held at the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz Oct 23-23. Register now! Links below. 1/3

The fantastically successful NIGMS MIRA R35 "expired" on May 17, after the most recent deadline--these removals are the most aggressive attack on American science in the current series of devastating actions 🧪

Excited to see this out in @science.org today!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Great news: NIH postbac program is recruiting again! If your grad school plans were affected by program cutbacks or admissions freezes this year I highly encourage you to apply, this could be a perfect opportunity. Please repost. www.training.nih.gov/research-tra...

Congrats to all the award winners and especially to Backus Lab PhD student Flowreen Shikwana and undergrad Joelle Darrouj!

U of Michigan @umich.edu set aside funds from central to support researchers with unexpected disruption in federal funding for up to 6 months. Are any other institutions doing this? Seems like a good move. #Medsky #NIH #federalfunding #researchfunding 🧪 record.umich.edu/articles/uni...

Bluetorial: Women, courage, and leadership What follows will include some generalizations based on population averages of what I have experienced over the course of my career. There are, of course, exceptions in every group who are substantially more to one extreme or the other.

One of the most significant and challenging projects of my career so far. PepCentric: a scalable computational platform utilizing novel 2-D fragment indexing for rapid peptide-centric searches, enabling proteogenomics searches against billions of spectra in seconds. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Extending my grant update this morning. Here are data limited to new and competitive renewal applications. The Pause is dead, Long live the Pause...

📢 Postdoc Opening – Metabolism & Cancer! 📢 Looking for a motivated postdoc to explore how metabolism regulates tumor initiation at Roswell Park in Buffalo, NY! Join us to tackle big questions with cool science in a collaborative environment. Interested? DM me! #PostdocJobs #CancerMetabolism

@standupforscience.bsky.social Los Angeles 3/7 noon at the Federal building docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

🚨 Chemical Biology & Probes study section (formerly SBCB, one of two NIH panels that reviews chemistry #chemsky 🧪) was abruptly POSTPONED w/no specific plans for rescheduling, less than 24h before start. If this affects you call your reps & senators, talk to local news, make your voice heard 📢 👩‍🔬

Today in @nature.com we share our back-to-back stories with Ning Zheng’s lab revealing chemical-genetic convergence between a molecular glue degrader & E3 ligase cancer mutations. 1/5

Biopharma companies and CEOs are keeping their heads down at their own peril. They should speak up about what’s happening to the NIH and other science agencies before it’s too late. Silence gives consent. And no one should consent to this.

8 years ago @asbmb.bsky.social gave me +18 more trainees a crash course in advocacy for their DC Hill Day. With NIH slashing indirect costs effective immediately, university Govt Affairs teams will be swamped. Here's 10 tips for scientists contacting lawmakers +pics from Denver's 2017 Science March.

A long post about what’s happening to the science funding agencies in the US and why. As mentioned, this one just kept getting longer even as I kept stripping curse words from it. www.science.org/content/blog...

Would love to hear if anyone has personally taken part to a study section meeting yet since this started. I know that we are told that all is moving on as usual, but is it?

Actual picture from a @riley-research.bsky.social group meeting this week

Excellent perspective by @lisamjarvis.bsky.social @bloomberg.com on the deep freeze at NIH

First lab #Chemrxiv preprint of 2025 and first foray into AI-based discovery of reactive cysteines! Congrats to First author Lisa Boatner and thanks to @forlilab.bsky.social, @jeeberhardt.bsky.social, and the rest of the team for the stellar collaboration! chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...

If you are interested in 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗶𝘁𝘆-𝗕𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗶𝗻 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴, definitely consider the #ABPP2025 conference on March 30th to April 2nd, 2025, at The Francis Crick Institute. Registration deadlines have been updated. www.linkedin.com/posts/14th-i...

Super excited to finally share PANCS-Binders: our group's decade-long quest to accelerate protein binder discovery. TLDR: PANCS-binders is fast (2 days), cheap (pennies), has extremely high fidelity (low false positive and negatives), and high-throughput. 1/n

🧪 Read the Special Issue of Journal of Proteome Research celebrating the essential contributions that women scientists have made, and are making, in the fields of Proteomics and Metabolomics. ow.ly/OcSl50TWOpU

First Bsky preprint from our lab--super proud of one of my first PhD students Jose Castellon on pushing hard to wrap up what turned out to be a really neat HTS screen of procapase-10. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hi #TeamMassSpec! #FeMS+ has joined BlueSky! Please share and get the word out so we can build up a base here.

There are no shortcuts in drug discovery. And it takes incredible efforts to make sense of what you can find in the scientific literature. This is an excellent piece of work to quality check what has been claimed as a new avenue in targeted protein degradation (TPD). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Women are under-represented at senior levels in #academia globally, & across all #science 🧪 disciplines, as shown by these "scissor-shaped curves" ✂️ So how can we ever achieve #gender #equality? We discuss various strategies in this #Cell Commentary #WomeninSTEM www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... 🧵 1/

Chemoproteomics starter pack, thanks mostly to @stephanhacker2.bsky.social's strong network go.bsky.app/JKJ1ZHt

The pSABER paper is now online! pSABER is a new method for amplifying in situ hybridization signals This work was driven by Sahar Attar and co-led by Ram Akliesh ([at] podocytes on the other app) with help from @shechnerlab.bsky.social @dschweppe.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415... 🧵 1/12

Applications for the 2025 Bioorganic GRC are now live! Here is the link where you can check out the current line-up: grc.org/bioorganic-c...