Your cryo-EM work deserves to be seen 🔬 Submit your poster or talk abstract for the annual New England cryo-EM symposium by July 15th. The meeting will be held September 8th at MIT. This is the place to be if you are doing structural biology in the Northeast! Register: cryoem.mit.edu/2026-ne-cryo...

1/7 New preprint: we found that Chlamydomonas carries a giant and unexpectedly elaborate chloroplast RNA polymerase with 12 previously unknown subunits, overturning the idea that the complexity of this organellar enzyme emerged during plant terrestrialization! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How does a cell remodel the ER membrane into a lipid droplet? Excited to share our new bioRxiv preprint, where we find that regulated opening of the seipin ring defines a functional ER–lipid droplet interface — and identify SMLR1 as a regulator of this transition. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I had such a fun time teaching at the U Michigan Cryo-ET Course this week! I taught quantitative ultrastructure analysis and we made cool figures like these! My course materials are at baradlab.com/michigan_tutorial for anyone to try. Workflow include mesh refinement and thickness measurement!

Very sad to learn that Steve White has passed away.

Finally out in @Cellcellpress! Proteins with long IDRs are prone to misfolding during protein synthesis. This is prevented by mRNA 3′UTRs that act as mRNA-based IDR chaperones. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

I've just released a small open-source utility for RELION users: relion_tracker. RELION stores a lot of useful information in the *_optimiser.star files, but I often found myself repeatedly grepping STAR files to see how metrics were changing across iterations.

Long shot, but, with lots of labs turning from crystallography to cryo-EM I’m wondering if anyone knows of labs potentially looking to offload some of their old crystallography supplies to a PUI with potential screening hits and really eager students but nothing to harvest with, etc.?

One, perhaps two, of our postdocs are moving on to faculty positions this year (more news soon!). While they're truly irreplaceable, it does mean that we have openings for new members to join our team studying #cilia. If interested, please apply: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15526

@johanduchene.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social Spent the last hour looking, found ten more apparently manipulated Western blots in Thermo Fisher's antibody verification data (across eight different catalogued products). Thread below. www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...

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!