The resolution revolution revisited pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42290378/ #cryoem

I don't usually post about my day job, but the University of Sheffield is planing a restructure and compulsory staff redundancies within Chemistry. 20% of staff are under threat. You can sign an open letter opposing this decision here #SaveSheffieldChemistry savesheffieldchemistry.netlify.app

Gargantuan deep-sea crustaceans can go for years without eating, thanks to a metabolism-related gene borrowed from bacteria go.nature.com/4v9LQPl

"Fellows shall not act or fail to act in any way which would […] bring the Society into disrepute." But this morning ministers condemned Elon Musk FRS for enabling violence on the streets of Belfast. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026... Would the @royalsociety.org like to comment?

This just keeps getting worse. For non-science people, we use commercial antibodies on a daily basis to detect proteins of interest using many methods. Bad antibodies mean bad results, which means a lot of medical research was wasted. I can't imagine the costs to trainees (their time), labs, etc.

Hosting @3cdf.bsky.social was a blast! Thanks to all attendees and presenters for sharing their exciting research! @robfagan.bsky.social @pssalgado.bsky.social @meeraunnikri.bsky.social @perbullough.bsky.social @johann-i2bc.bsky.social

Measles vaccines save millions of lives each year. Measles used to be an extremely common disease. Just sixty years ago, over 90% of children would have been infected by it, and of those who developed symptoms, around a quarter would be hospitalized.

We are looking for an enthusiastic postdoc to investigate molecular mechanisms of microsporidian infection using soft X-ray tomography, cryo FIB-SEM, and cryoET. If you are interested, do not hesitate to get in touch and check out the application link. The closing date: 21st June 2026.

Catalogue entries for more than 100 antibodies sold by the research services and supply company Thermo Fisher Scientific contain images that have apparently been manipulated, according to a pair of science sleuths. go.nature.com/4wX4yej

This is awful to hear, describing how Sean Eddy (HMMER, infernal, pfam, rfam) has been defunded. The letter said his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," www.npr.org/2026/05/21/n...

Universities across England face ‘real risk’ of closure due to insolvency for first time www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

The physical-sciences repository arXiv is banning researchers from posting their manuscripts on the platform for one year if a submission is found to contain references that have been hallucinated by artificial-intelligence tools. go.nature.com/4nDfXvv

I had fun writing a short commentary on the importance of integrating prophage biology into microbiome research 🦠 Now out in @cp-cellhostmicrobe.bsky.social #microbiomesky #phagesky www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

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.

Want to find #prophage in your #bacteria genomes? We built PhiSpy a long time ago, and now we've created a new web page for it: linsalrob.github.io/PhiSpyWeb/ Best of all, the data never leaves your computer! #phage #phagesky

#Bacteriophages infecting #Klebsiella show capsule specificity that strongly shapes host range. @rafalmostowy.bsky.social &co reveal diverse prophage-encoded receptor-binding enzymes, including esterases, that drive capsule tropism @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/48z4DdE

Super exciting news 🚨 I am hiring a technician to join my brand new lab at the University of Birmingham! @imibirmingham.bsky.social Come and support my BBSRC-funded research on understanding how staphylococci survive antibiotics. Please share! 🧫🧪 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRH271/a...

Since its first isolation in 1935, several thousand Clostridioides difficile isolates have been collected & analyzed. In #ClinMicroRev: an overview of the current C. difficile population structure, including a summary of the 5 main clades. Read now: asm.social/2TC

CRUK goes green [OA] news.cancerresearchuk.org/2026/04/01/w...

Sad news on the passing of Prof. Andreas Engel, a pioneer in the field of cryo-EM (shared with the 3DEM community by Henning Stahlberg). Andreas' kindness, warmth, and enthusiasm for science and his colleagues will be missed.

ROCKET 🚀 inference-time optimization of AlphaFold to fit structural data is published! rdcu.be/fa9YH Since our preprint, we’ve pushed it to regimes where other methods break: low resolution, weak signal, real experimental edge cases. Here’s what we learned: 1/15

Associate Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor position in Molecular Microbiology available at Lund University, Sweden: lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

My late husband would have been so excited about this news! Scientists discover new heavy proton-like particle at CERN share.google/8aKm98yYU5NE...

New paper from us. If you're interested in genetic manipulation of Clostridia, we have a few new tools for you! 36 new plasmids - all available from @addgene.bsky.social www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/jour... #microsky

"My name may be forgotten when it comes, but the time will arrive when great outbreaks of cholera will be things of the past. And it is the knowledge of the way in which the disease is propagated which will cause them to disappear" Happy birthday to John Snow! His name & his work is not forgotten.

It depends, on the A100 or the H200?

For the first time, researchers have simulated nearly every chemical reaction in a living bacterial cell go.nature.com/4lrAulM

🦠 “𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗶𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘂𝘀 — 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘄?” Historian @kirchhelle.bsky.social chats with 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗮 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗲 & 𝗝𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝗘𝗯𝗱𝗲𝗻 about revival of phage biology & phage therapy as antibiotics fail. 🎧 2024 BBC Radio 4 — listen worldwide: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... #phage #phagesky #microsky

I've written a review on what I think is an extremely exciting direction in cryo-EM: Cryo-EM of endogenous membrane proteins in their native lipid bilayer Open access in Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics: doi.org/10.1017/S003...

It's been a privilege to be involved with this. #FRET approaches have so many potential applications for linking in vitro studies with in cell behaviours, but lacked a consistent benchmarking molecule that works across systems: not any more! #IDRs #smFRET #singlemolecule

Q-scores are calculated for atomic models derived from 3D electron microscopy maps, measure how well the model fits the map and reflect the quality of the map itself. 🔗 Find out more: https://ow.ly/4Vkx50Ynrxi @ucsandiego @ActaCrystD @IUCr #CryoEM #QScores #Validation

What happens when you combine all that is known about a large protein with almost 2000 residues with Alphafold2, new experiments, and in-depth structural bioinformatics? www.life-science-alliance.org/content/9/4/...

Are you looking for an interdisciplinary PhD? I have a 4 year PhD opportunity in my group to work on devising enzymatic route to oligonucleotide synthesis - combines protein engineering, directed evolution & X-ray crystallography at York with nucleotide chemistry at MIB, University of Manchester.

Having made the transition from primarily X-ray crystallography to cryoEM, this resource would have been invaluable.

What’s holding back clinical use of phage therapy in the UK? Our workshop last year brought together international experts, biotech and regulators to find out Meeting Report out now in Nature Microbiology with our take on the challenges and opportunities facing the UK phage therapy sector

Cryo-EM structures of bacteriophage T4 portal-neck assembly intermediates reveal a viral genome retention mechanism pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41654509/ #cryoem

It was great to play a part in this study, using all of the work on alphaproteobacterial GTAs to help inform and identify key tell-tale patterns of GTAs in the human gut microbiome. I'm sure there will be many great followup studies on these fascinating particles. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

These are the life-blood of science. All that lab knowledge lost, careers ended. All the investment in their training to this point lost to academic research. That's the human cost of UKRI's "review period to develop implementation"

I know what they're getting at with the "could put jobs at risk" but can we focus on the immediate impact? Each suspended round at MRC and BBSRC means about 80 fewer postdoc jobs and the retrospective cuts at MRC add another 30 or so

We need to be shouting about the effects of this on junior researchers from the roofs, writing to our MPs. We are risking a "missing generation" of researchers.

Would have been good to have added an apology for the lack of comms so far this year, particularly for those that submitted grants to UKRI applicant-led funding streams in Sept 2025, as these are highly unlikely to be funded (www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...)

I am sorry. We all knew the three buckets were coming. We are all prepared for a shift in priority. But this message does nothing for all the UK scientists dependent on project grant funding. It doesn’t actually give any information www.ukri.org/news/open-le...

Finally comms from UKRI - on a Sunday evening. No mention of the hundreds of ECRs who will see their careers ended by these decisions and notably no explanation for MRC retrospectively applying cuts and wasting all the work that went into writing, reviewing and scoring applications - £millions

Dr Sir Ian If this statement is supposed to reassure that everything is under control, you are sadly very wrong. Strategic change needs managing to take the community with you, what’s happening now with MRC, BBSRC, STFC etc looks like panic & smells of desperation. Do better

At a time when the UK should be capitalising on its global reputation as a great place to do science, this is an enormous own goal. I am so sorry for all those who jobs are going to be impacted.

Leaks everywhere and finally we get an official statement, one that somehow manages to say a lot while; No timelines. No clarity. No acknowledgement of impact on ECRs whose careers depend UKRI funding. “Later this year” isn’t a plan. And the sector deserves better than reassurance without detail.

Startling that this is being broadcast in the absence of any public communications by @ukri.org The academic community has a right to expect to be told first hand what is happening with response mode funding and what the immediate future looks like www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

Quite timely that Sir Ian Chapman, UKRI CEO, will be in front of the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee on Tuesday next week… 👀

Dear colleagues in science - it is time to stop normalising the emerging fascism of the US by attending conferences there as though everything is fine.