Earlier this week I posted an example of a fake western blot provided by ThermoFisher to demonstrate the validity of a p53 antibody. I considered it an amusing curiosity. In fact Thermo Fisher Scientific has systematically manipulated antibody validation data!

Super cool idea for "credit" for peer reviews! Would love for this to be implemented: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Between being a parent and academia, sometimes we get so little positive feedback that when my hygienist said "your teeth are great, keep doing what you're doing" I almost cried 😅

Profile Description updated! P.S., we are still looking for a postdoc😀

I read yesterday that the consensus among climate scientists is that the worst predictions they had made about climate change are off the table thanks to use of renewable energy sources. Solar, wind, soon hydrogen power are going to save us from the worst.

🚨 Lipid Time 🚨 New preprint out! Using high-throughput Martini 2 simulations, we studied ~5,000 transmembrane helices in a phase-separating membrane. Most helices preferred disordered environments, some localized at domain interfaces, but none in the liquid-ordered phase! doi.org/10.64898/202...

This is a great idea that we should implement

When #gradstudents give #ResearchInProgress talks, they should also take like an extra hour or two of their time to sit down with 2-5 faculty after the talk to have a 1-on-1,. This would be a good time for some focused discussion and great practice for interviews for their future #postdoc positions.

Surprised to discover that Thermo Fisher appears to show a fake western blot for the validation of one of their p53 antibodies. I've added a diagram to show the very similar bands. This does not appear to be one of the "published figures" but their own internal data.

Science nerds of BSKY: Next week I’m interviewing Prof. Sir John Bell about recent medical breakthroughs, touching on - Gene therapies & cancer vaccines - Tech in healthcare more broadly - Ethics & regulation This includes a Q&A where I can field your questions. If you have any please post below 🙏

It is worth saying that it appears that the brave and principled actions of people of Minneapolis and the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good seem to have been a legitimate inflection point in American politics. We should carry that forward with us.

Excited to share our latest work in @ScienceAdvances! 🔬 We’ve developed "dynaMIET"—a new spectroscopy technique that finally allows us to simultaneously measure 3D membrane dynamics in live cells with nanometer precision. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Real breakthrough! Membrane undularion and 3D topography are real. DynaMIET gives access!

During a GenEd final today, I witnessed two students looking at each other's test paper for pretty much the whole exam. - They were told that they had two different versions. - Neither attended more than 10% of classes. Amazing. #AcademicSky

Excited to share our work uncovering SNOR, a ribosome-associated factor that promotes translation restart after dormancy published in Nature!! This was, as usual, a wonderful collaborative effort between our group and the Mattei Lab @simonemattei.bsky.social @embl.org www.nature.com/articles/s41...

TLDR; hoes mad

Not now huge evil eye in outer space.

FWIW, I don’t think the major problem in my field, or related ones, is that people need to move faster & produce more. I read a lot of papers as part of the job, and I’m increasingly convinced we’d benefit from fewer papers and better ones, not more mediocre work produced ever more “efficiently.”

Out now in @annualreviews.bsky.social: my review on the origins of eukaryotic membrane traffic! I propose that archaea-derived proteins supported a primordial system of tubules to ferry cargo between compartments. Modern coated vesicles may have been a later innovation. doi.org/10.1146/annu...

A new goal for the rest of the year os to write 1 email a week to my congressional representatives. I feel like thats a small thing that would be worth the five minutes. If anyone would like to join, we could draft together and invite more people.

My son had a growth spurt and slimmed out and now I also want a growth spurt.

What membrane properties do cells maintain through regulation of lipid metabolism? In a new paper, we identify intrinsic curvature stress as one such parameter and show how different (eukaryotic) cell types employ different lipids to do that www.cell.com/cell-reports...

It was fun writing this with David @dgershlick.bsky.social! Check it our if you want to hear our view on small #GTPases networks in endosomal trafficking :) part of the themed issue on Membrane trafficking edited by @fromme-lab.bsky.social and Philippe Chavrier www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Beautiful work by @franbottanelli.bsky.social lead by @probablycarmen.bsky.social now out. Was fun to contribute!

Exciting to see this out in its final form! Wonderful work led by @probablycarmen.bsky.social. Want to know why protrusions are better at initiating immune signaling in #Tcells? Look no further. Link to Carmen’s 🧵 on the preprint bsky.app/profile/prob...

There is not just one but two Breakthrough Prize winners from the NIH intramural program this year! Hearty congratulations Bryan Traynor “For the discovery of the most common genetic cause of ALS and frontotemporal dementia ….” breakthroughprize.org/Laureates/2/...

This program transformed my career! Please apply. @hhmi-science.bsky.social's #FreemanHrabowski Scholars Program offers early career faculty up to $10M over 10 yrs, plus salary & benefits. Postdoc? This year's competition has a program for you too. Applications open 11/3! bit.ly/4vhC0LA

Our latest #abscission paper is online at MBoC www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/... . We looked at what happens when there are stochastic abscission failures in a polarized epithelium in vivo. 1/6

Amazing, fascinating, surprising, baffling story!! Check it out below

Dear Lipid and Membrane Enthusiasts, There is only one month!! left to register and submit your abstracts for the @embo.org Workshop “Lipid Code to Life”, which will be held from September 7–11, 2026, in Dresden, Germany. Workshop program and registration page: meetings.embo.org/event/26-lip...

Amazing find by @oliverrocks.bsky.social and @pm-mueller.bsky.social , such a cool discovery. Was fun to be involved.

☕ @mathilda95.bsky.social @nadlerlab.bsky.social & co introduce a correlative light and electron #microscopy workflow, Lipid-CLEM, combining near-native #lipid probes and on-section labelling via click chemistry. Lipid-CLEM quantitatively analyses lipids in membrane nanodomains. bit.ly/4moYLJH

New paper where we report that Npc2 - a shuttle-like lipid transfer protein - in yeast directly transports sphingolipids to the = vacuole membrane during formation of microautophagy-linked ordered domains #lipidtime www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Just look at this graph (Fig 5A,B from Koeber et al). Amazing. Congratulations to the Pollard lab and all authors. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Time to put the new German Society for Cell Biology lunchroom into your calendar! As always an excellent lineup:

1/25 New paper out in PNAS! We show that the fitness costs of reproductive specialization, where somatic cells give up reproduction, scale inversely with organism size. Larger organisms can afford far more soma, removing a key barrier to multicellular complexity.

OH. MY. GOD. THIS IS THE EARTHSET PHOTO FROM ARTEMIS II. IM SPEECHLESS.

Imagine you’re a Hollywood producer or a TV executive in 2015 and a screenwriter pitches you a future where a President issues this message on Easter Sunday. The writer would never work again

Going to space is one of the coolest things humans have done

Time is flying by ⌛😱 Recently celebrated the first birthday of my lab at @uni-of-warwick.bsky.social @mechanochemistry.org It's been a lot of fun. Many thanks to my great colleagues and amazing team who makes the science happen. Looking forward to our next scienceventures 🔬👨‍🔬👩‍🔬 #FCS #FLIM

Every PI

Do we grow wiser as we age? I spent 15+ years chasing glam journals, wasting time and energy (and frustrating my team and co-authors). I don’t want to wake up at 70 and realize my life went into convincing a few editors my work was trendy enough. Enough. I’ll try to be smarter.

This is what it looks like when a star goes supernova.

im so lucky to be able to surround myself with cell biology and scientists, seeing the result of people's hard work and rigorous questioning is seriously inspiring

Our NIAAA funded Post-DoctT32 has received its NoA (non competing renewal). Are you looking for a post-doc and interested in joining our amazing center? If so, reach out! Here is a convenient form that you can use to upload CV and a cover letter! unc.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

I'm thrilled to be starting as Professor for Molecular Biology at Heidelberg University in April. Looking forward to this adventure!

It’s incredibly hard to study lipids in biological membranes on the nanoscale. You need near-perfect information on both membrane ultrastructure and lipid density. Lipid-CLEM, now out in @natcellbio.nature.com brought to you by @mathilda95.bsky.social changes that: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am extremely excited that my first first-author paper from my PhD is finally out 😆!! We developed a new CLEM workflow to measure lipid densities at the nanoscale. So if you are into lipids and super-resolution imaging approaches, this one is for you: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I think im never going to get over super resolution microscopy

Just the story of his name is one of the coolest things of all time