A huge milestone for the lab! The first Ph.D. from the lab, Dr. Jaimin Rana. In keeping with my training and German tradition, he received a Doktorhut! Jaimin graduates with 2 first-author manuscripts (one more to come soon) and 5 additional manuscripts in which he is a contributing author.

Measles is coming back. Until now, we didn't know how human antibodies actually recognize and neutralize the virus. No structure of either measles surface protein bound to a human antibody had ever been reported. We set out to change that.

New preprint 🚀 ❄️ We developed Autogrid-compatible HPF planchettes that enable direct freezing of clipped EM grids and streamline integration with cryo-FIB workflows ✔️ improved grid stability ✔️ reduced handling ✔️ robust vitrification (🦠 🧫 🧠) A step toward routine HPF for complex samples #teamtomo

Excited to share our paper about copick, a dataset API and toolkit for collaborative annotation and analysis of #cryoET data! Whether you're picking particles or curating segmentations, copick reduces friction and brings #OME-Zarr to cryoET without breaking pipelines. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1002/pro.70578

1/ Excited to share our preprint! 🥳 Degradation of aromatic compounds, including BTEX pollutants, requires highly endergonic aromatic ring reduction. Using #cryoEM and in situ #cryoET, we show how BCRII couples electron bifurcation modules in one giant redox machine www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I am excited to share our most recent work collaborating with @centriolelab.bsky.social and @stearnslab.bsky.social to look at the ciliary base of mammalian multiciliated cells w/ cryo-ET, XL/MS, and U-ExM www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Molecular architecture of the ciliary base in mammalian multiciliated cells https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04.05.716577v1

The LSI labs of David H. Sherman and Filipa Pereira have teamed up to boost bacterial production of a long-elusive compound, leading to a potential new treatment for drug-resistant malaria. Read more: research.umich.edu/research-sto...

Neurodegeneration risk variants promote lysosomal TMEM106B fibrilaccumulation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.26.714634v1

Excited to share this collaborative work with Ward and Petrucelli Labs! We show that two major genetic risk factors for #neurodegeneration and cognitive decline converge on TMEM106B fibrils accumulating within lysosomes. A LOT of work packed in here 🧠🔬 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Holy smoke. What ultimately happened???

Remember that everyone you meet is fighting their own battle, sometimes with amino acids

Incredibly proud of our small but mighty team at Interdict Bio as we bring the interdictor modality closer to the clinic! Check out our first publication that lays the foundation for context-dependent translation modulators as a therapeutic approach for cancer! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Graduate student Martin Fernandez just won the best poster 🏆 at the Gordon Research Conference on ‘Frontotemporal Dementia and Related Rare Dementias’ #proudPI

Please spread the word: the Structural Studies Division @mrclmb.bsky.social is looking for a new tenure-track, independent group leader with an exciting plan in any area of Structural (Molecular & Cell) biology, in discovery biology and/or methods development. 🥳 mrc.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/...

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

I am getting excited about teaching at this! I think we're going to do copick, membrain-seg, morphometrics, and surforama on my day!

Join us this summer for U-M's 2026 #CryoET Data Processing Workshop! This four-day workshop will introduce participants to standard image processing packages and all aspects of cryo-ET data processing. Apply by March 20: myumi.ch/lsi-cryo-workshop-2026 @jbquerido.bsky.social @shyamalm.bsky.social

Caveolins are conserved (metazoan) proteins essential for forming membrane-derived vesicles called caveolae. While evolutionarily distant caveolins have similar structures, we found they do not maintain caveolae-generating capabilities (movie). What determines this? Check out our new preprint!

Introducing The Structural History of Eukarya (SHE): The first proteome-scale phylogeny constructed entirely from 3D structure. We computed 300 trillion alignments across 1,542 species to map the tree of life. 🧵👇 (1/5)

I've been working on Surface Morphometrics for a new version (coming soon), and made some significant (AI-assisted) performance improvements, especially in pycurv (20-50x!). If you've had technical issues or just felt like it was too slow, give it another try! #teamtomo github.com/GrotjahnLab/...

"AI is rapidly populating medical records with synthetic content, creating a feedback loop [that] drives a rapid erosion of pathological variability and diagnostic reliability...this renders AI generated documentation clinically useless after just two generations" www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...

EMBL is deeply saddened by the passing of our Interim Director General Peer Bork, a pioneering scientist who left an indelible imprint on life science research in Europe and beyond. We extend our deepest condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues. www.embl.org/news/people-...

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!

#Postdoc job opportunity: The Pereira lab at the LSI is seeking a postdoctoral researcher help develop cutting-edge experimental and computational approaches to accelerate #NaturalProduct discovery. Learn more and apply: careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

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/...

Wow! Amazing stuff from @matteoall.bsky.social. Congratulations to all the authors involved.

It’s out! Using cryo-ET in Dicty cells, we take a fresh in situ look at vaults. Surprisingly, we uncover vaults associated with ER and NE membranes, and find that many vaults enclose ribosomes in defined orientations, opening new avenues to their cellular function! www.biorxiv.org/lookup/conte...

Check out our new work! In collaboration with @moitrayee-lab.bsky.social lab at Yale!

I would be particularly keen to chat with #cryoET experts who would be interested in working on exciting new models of neurodegeneration, but the brief is wide open and could involve tau filament formation with recombinant protein, in cell cultures or in mice.

Thrilled to share my recent work from the Pereira and Sherman Labs at @umlifesciences.bsky.social, out now in Communications Chemistry! We applied metabolic engineering, semi-synthesis, and biocatalysis to expand access to the antimalarial natural product premarineosin A. I suggest you check it out!

Thrilled to share that the final piece of my PhD work is now on bioRxiv! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... With support from @nvidia and the @NSF, we used AlphaFold to screen 1.6M+ protein pairs, revealing thousands of potential novel PPIs. All data can be viewed at predictomes.org/hp

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/...

Happy to share this satellite story. Structure of tau filaments from the amygdala of patients with mixed pathologies #Alzheimer’s and LATE. Strikingly, none of the patients had documented head injury or trauma but tau adopts a CTE-fold Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Nothing short of spectacular!🤩

Very excited that my final postdoctoral work is now online in Cell @cellpress.bsky.social. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Using 16 (!) cryo-EM structures, we uncovered how the three proteins coronin, cofilin and AIP1 work together to rapidly disassemble actin filaments.

Great discussion here!

New PrePrint from the Vecchiarelli and Mosalaganti (@shyamalm.bsky.social) labs! 🧵 Collaboration with the Giessen and Pi labs Congratulations to co-first authors Y Hoang (@hoanghamyy.bsky.social) and Pankaj Jadhav! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Ever wondered how to position organelles in bacteria? Wonder no more! Happy to have contributed to this fantastic story from @cellforganized.bsky.social' lab. The avenues this opens in the synthetic biology space are enormous! Movie: Carboxysomes positioned in E. coli! Preprint: shorturl.at/D6xVg

If you are thinking about the future of structural biology, we are too! Our two cents (Jürgen Plitzko and I) just got published online here: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

HPV is the most common STI. Revisiting the infection pathways, we discover that, contrary to the accepted model of trafficking, HPV stays intact and infectious in host cell lysosomes 🤯. Among other discoveries, we show that the intact virus is a cargo of COPI-coated pits!

Happy to have contributed to this amazing story by Hari!

Our new preprint: how photoprotection is spatially coordinated with energy metabolism. Photosystem I is major source of radicals. We report EM structure of PSI in complex with superoxide dismutase SOD: direct link between energy conversion & oxidative stress defence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are happy to release LocScale2.0: a tool for context-aware, confidence-weighted cryoEM map optimisation. Taking two half maps as input, LcoScale-2.0 produces feature-enhanced maps along with a robust confidence score that guides objective map interpretation. cryotud.github.io/locscale/

We’ve uncovered Asgard chromatin structures formed by a Hodarchaeal histone : closed hypernucleosome conserved in archaea and an open form resembling the H3-H4 eukaryotic octasome. Fantastic work by @harshranawat.bsky.social! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #Chromatin #Asgard #Archaea #cryoEM

Toggle-Untoggle: A cell segmentation tool with an interactive user verification interface. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.21.655178v1

Happy to have contributed to this amazing story from @caroleparentlab.bsky.social at the @umlifesciences.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41... Congrats to all involved.

Problem cryo-ET structure alert. A recent paper by Lange et al. in @natcellbio.nature.com (tinyurl.com/38s6a4dn) reported an unusual-looking model of the prohibitin complex in situ. We asked: how was this structure generated? Our reanalysis offers an explanation: tinyurl.com/mszdtwxx 🧵