Science isn’t just a cost. It’s an engine of economic growth. The UK treats scientific R&D as distinct industry in national accounts. It’s ~0.7% of economy, yet ONS identified it as biggest contributors to GDP growth in May after it expanded by 5.1% vs 0.1% overall stocks.apple.com/Aa-EfoztMSEi...

Blue whales sing so deep they can't be heard by killer whales! New piece on some work I did... spacedaily.com/t-a-universi...

Our new paper is out in @nature.com! We uncovered how a naked mole-rat queen 👑 controls an entire colony: a natural contraceptive scent that suppresses reproduction in other females! A remarkable mammalian parallel to bees and ants! 🐝🐜 @garyrlewin.bsky.social youtu.be/enfv3zJrWKM?...

Our single-cell atlas paper made the cover 🎉 image by @lbmountain.bsky.social, showing the mature Brachy epidermis in all its beauty. #GoBrachy: yellow is lignin, and blue is cell wall autofluorescence.

How do plant kinesins work at the single-molecule level? We break it all down in our new review "Plant kinesins: a bottom-up approach - from single molecules to function" published in JXB @jxbotany.bsky.social 🎉 Check it out: doi.org/10.1093/jxb/... #Plant #Kinesin #SingleMolecule #ZMBP

Team science preprint, exploring the capabilities and limitations of Alphafold3 across different application areas, including protein-RNA, protein-lipid, ubiquitination,TCR and antibody recognition with @ninjani.bsky.social @labvanni.bsky.social @dgfeller.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Preprint! How do "friendly" rhizobia build a legume nodule? @albinteulet.bsky.social found that some may carry hidden transcription factors - proteins that mimic DNA-binding folds to enter the plant nucleus and rewrite its developmental program. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/6)

Excited to see our new preprint on bioRxiv! 🌱🤖 We used AI protein design (RFdiffusion + ProteinMPNN) to build brand-new sensor domains from scratch and installed them in a rice NLR immune receptor engineering recognition of a Fusarium effector FoSSP17

Hello from academia

Very happy with our @greenrobust.de @isabelmonte.bsky.social Plant Robustness session at the @sebiology.bsky.social conference. Excellent talks by @hildenelissen.bsky.social, Marcel Quint, @rsasidharan.bsky.social and Amy Austin. Great fishbowl discussion on plant robustness! Thanks PlantJ

Defining the Xanthomonas euvesicatoria type II-secreted effector arsenal: core nutritional functions and effector diversity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.19.733414v1

cxtoolshed.rbvi.ucsf.edu/apps/chimera... Available through the toolshed now! Thanks to the chimera team for reviewing this one very quickly.

Excited to share my paper! 🥳 Today in #Nature we reveal an 8 MDa Hdr electron bifurcating super-assembly in class I methanogens that couples the first and last steps of hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis. A lineage-specific adaptation to anaerobic niches. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How plant stem cells are kept robust summarized by GreenRobust PIs Jan Lohmann (@meristemania.bsky.social) and Thomas Greb (@thomasgreb.bsky.social). Enjoy! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

See the In brief article by Jan Hübbers about our recent publication @theplantcell.bsky.social "Baiting blast fungi: An engineered NLR domain improves effector recognition" academic.oup.com/plcell/advan...

We are excited to invite all current and former members of the Kamoun Lab, together with their lab members and our collaborators to the Kamoun Lab Alumni Meeting on Monday, 7 September 2026 ahead of the ECPP and BSPP at the Assembly House, Norwich.

Our group is moving from @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social to the maritime city of Kiel! ⛵️🩵 I will lead the Department of Marine Plant Development and Physiology @uni-kiel.de 🌱🪸🌊 Look out for opportunities to join us in this exciting & growing hub for Plant, Marine & Evolutionary Biology in North Germany 🇩🇪

1/ Happy to share our preprint! The Mtr complex catalyses the second-to-last step of the methanogenesis and is an essential bioenergetic machine in most methanogenic archaea. Anaerobic cryo-EM of Mtr reveals a nitrogenase-like metallocluster bound at its active site! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The anaerobic cryo-EM structure of the methanogenic Mtr complex reveals a nitrogenase-like [FeSC] cluster bound to its active site https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.03.736320v1

New paper! 🚀 A high-affinity anti- #mNeonGreen #nanobody turns #mNG into a #multifunctional Tag. @nanotag.bsky.social decided to openly share the #nanobody for research use. Not common, but we strongly believe well-defined reagents are key for reproducible science. We hope you find it useful! 💚

Surface immune signaling unlocks NLR activation through mRNA alternative splicing www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to share our new preprint led by Fred and me in collaboration with the archaeal community! We found that the molecular foundation of histone-based chromatin has pre-eukaryotic roots in Asgard archaea. (1/4) #ArchaeaSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#pictureofthemonth: Plant cells use tiny pores called plasmodesmata to talk to each other. The rendering, shows how everything links together. More: www.biochem.mpg.de/baumeister-p... July – Calendar of @mpiforbi.bsky.social and @mpibiochem.bsky.social 📸 by Monika Krause & Marcel Dickmanns

1/13 So excited to share our new preprint!! How do organelles pack together in a crowded cytoplasm? we know organelles interact via contact sites, but how does competition for space contribute to organelle morphology and interactions? @wallaceucsf.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 New in @natmicrobiol.nature.com! We reveal how the antibiotic target PBP1b fortifies the E.coli division site against osmotic rupture. Proud this was completed in our independent labs @dmf-unil.bsky.social, with @avettiger.bsky.social. Congratulations to all authors! 🦠❄️🔬 #teamtomo bit.ly/3SCbOg1 👇

Excited to see our story published in @natmicrobiol.nature.com today! It’s been a long journey. We answered a major outstanding question: why does E. coli encode two aPBPs, yet only one plays a critical role in ensuring reliable PG fortification during cell division?

The new edition of #EMBOinsitu takes place in February 2027 and registrations are now open! Submit your abstract by 3 November and join us to explore current and future opportunities for in situ structural biology, with a focus on system-wide approaches 🔬 s.embl.org/iss27-01-bl

Thrilled to see this work finally out in Nature Communications! @natcomms.nature.com. Thanks again to all the people involved, to @lfaino.bsky.social and @teamthomma.bsky.social .

📢 Applications are now open for the #ARISE2 Fellowship Programme! With funding from MSCA, the programme trains scientists to become leaders in Research Infrastructures and innovate in the life sciences. 🧪 Apply here: www.embl.org/training/ari...

🔥My first (co)first-author paper is out🔥 The surfaces of Gram+ and Gram- bacteria are markedly different from each other. How are phages equipped to breach the Gram+ envelope❓ 💡We report a baseplate structure uniquely adapted to infect Gram+ S. aureus. A 🧵⬇️ 1/8 #phagesky #cryoEM 🧪

Important news! The new ISMPMI website is live! Visit the site to get society news, watch posted videos, listen to our podcasts, become or manage your membership and more. ismpmi.org

Excited to share our new preprint! 🧬❄️ by brilliant @mdreimann.bsky.social and great collaborators! Using cryo-ET&EM, we reveal archaeal chromatin in a near-native state: variable-beads-on-a-string fibers shaped by growth phase and histone composition #ArchaeaSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Also, come talk to me about the amazing opportunity to access to a miriad of scientific services through Europe thanks to @agroserv.bsky.social initiative! #RBMP2026 agroserv.eu

‼️Job altert🚨📢 please spread the word: We're looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join our new department "Phytopathology and Plant Protection" at @unihalle.bsky.social. www.verwaltung.uni-halle.de/DEZERN3/AUSS...

We're delighted to announce the 9th Austrian Cryo-EM (ACE) Symposium - Sept 24-25, 2026 at IMP, Vienna. Organized with @istaresearch.bsky.social 🎤 Abstract deadline: Aug 5, 2026 📅 Info & registration: imp.ac.at/research/cryo-em-symposium/

New Scientific Highlight! This time focusing on EasyGrid, a system developed by the Papp Team at @embl.org Grenoble to allow fully automated sample preparation and quality control for cryo-electron microscopy and tomography.

Today marks a major milestone for my lab @zmbp-tuebingen.bsky.social. We got our first member! I am really excited to welcome @d-moser.bsky.social. She will bring her expertise in cryo-ET data processing to solve the mechanisms of plant invasion by fungal pathogens 🧊🔬🌾🍄 Follow her and stay tuned!

Glad to be attending #RBMP2026 in Bilbao this week! Very excited about the opportunity to (re)connect with the Spanish plant molecular biology community :D Come along poster S3.P9 to chat about plant structural biology and ribosome dormancy 🌱🧊🔬

I am thrilled to share our paper out in @cp-cell.bsky.social : "Systematic Discovery of Pathogen Effector Functions across Human Pathogens and Pathways." (1/4) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

We're pleased to sponsor the 13th Plant Molecular Biology Meeting, 1–3 July, Bilbao, Spain. rbmp2026.com/RBMP/en/info

Incredibly proud of Messi Haile @mehsehret.bsky.social, a founding member of the Ho Lab, for her beautiful work uncovering the inner workings of a central piece of the malaria parasite invasion machinery: the malarial moving junction, out today in @cellpress.bsky.social! tinyurl.com/4p3md2eb 🦠❄️🔬

New Online! Plucking cellular ribosomes with Ribo-Tweezer

Pathogens have spent millions of years learning how to hijack human cells. Now, researchers from the Stark lab at the IMP and the Taipale lab at the Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto, have built a platform to systematically discover how they do it:

“The biases do not disappear; they get encoded into the model and then laundered into outputs that feel objective because they are numerical. “

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

Exactly my thoughts re the "unbiased" QED 1% list- this analysis puts it on firmer footing. One thing not captured here is the prominence of well-established authors; that's what triggered me whether QED was really ranking the science OR influenced by signals assoc'd w/ scientific prominence- EB

Excited to share our new preprint! How does the cyanobacterial hydrogenase HoxEFUYH drive photosynthetic H₂ production? Using #cryoEM, biochemistry, FTIR and EPR spectroscopy, we reveal its molecular mechanism, including the basis of electron bifurcation/confurcation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...