Yesterday the UK Government published a data provision notice paving the way for coded GP data in England to be shared with consented cohorts like UK Biobank. Hear from Val, a UK Biobank participant on her hopes for the future.

Only a week left to apply for the 'Structural characterisation of macromolecular complexes' course at EMBL Grenoble! Learn about the strategic use of cutting-edge protein structure prediction methods and recent advances in in situ structural biology. 🧬 #EMBOMacromolecular s.embl.org/mmo26-01-bl

This is just great to see. The ~1/3rd of UK BioBank with GP data already shows the utility but going across the entire dataset will allow far more insights - a reminder that UK BioBank participants have generously consented for their data to be used for research outcomes.

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

Cloud clearing from the Nekar valley around Heidelberg on this icy morning

It has been two weeks since the unexpected death of Peer Bork, and all of us in his research group are deeply missing him. His scientific vision brought us together as a team, and we are immensely grateful for the time we spent together. 🧵

We are hiring for group leaders again — EBI is a great place to start your research group! embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/EMBL/job/Hin...

EMBL & CNR have renewed their MoU, reinforcing long-term science collaboration. This was followed by the CNR President’s visit to the CNR-EMBL Rome premises. These milestones align strategies to support the continued development of the campus and its community.

Good morning beautiful Heidelberg

Excited to share that we’ve received an ERC Proof of Concept grant 🎉. This support will help translate our ERC funded research on developing advanced Brillouin imaging tools into real-world applications. Grateful to @erc.europa.eu and @embl.org and to my amazing lab that's behind the work!

I have been one of the many people across the world impacted by the sudden death of Peer Bork - a friend, colleague and remarkable scientist. I now have enough time this weekend to write some personal thoughts about Peer. www.linkedin.com/posts/ewan-b...

I am excited to see what one can do with this - protein "sequencing" (at the moment, bar code read out) - at the single peptide (molecule by molecule) level - and there will be a point where the signal to noise in the squiggle is good enough to move to peptide identification from a database.

Totally agree - from the excellent Mathieu Boulard @embl.org Rome site.

Kindergarten drop off traffic in Finland.

Two new chapters from my free online book in human genetics out this weekend! These complete Part 3 of the book, on human population structure and history: 3.3: Human prehistory [separate thread] 3.4: Ancient DNA: a genetic time capsule [this thread] web.stanford.edu/group/pritch...

This went under the radar but answers a fundamental question in Epigenetics... From many hundreds of olfactory receptor genes, each neuron selects expression of only single one (near-randomly). How? Outstanding work from Mathieu Boulard and colleagues www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

There are many concepts which are useful and important in helping us make sense of biology, but which do not correspond to something real at a fundamental level. Species exist in our books and papers, but biology doesn't know about them.

Great science thrives on sharing knowledge across borders, and the EMBL Sabbatical Fellowship Programme helps make that possible. We're excited to host Natalie Twine from CSIRO. Learn about her time at EMBL-EBI and the Sabbatical Fellowship Programme👇

The final Calvin and Hobbes, which appeared in papers 30 years ago today.

Chemists out there - learning about point group symmetries from my son - what is the point of pint group symmetries? Given the computational modelling now available for Raman etc … is this needed. It is … cute

On the first day of Christmas (in about 2014), @duckswabber.bsky.social gave to me - a partridge in a pear tree. Happy Christmas everyone!

New result: you can build a universal computer using a single billiard ball on a carefully crafted table! More precisely: you can create a computer that can run any program, using just a single point moving frictionlessly in a region of the plane and bouncing off the walls elastically. (1/n)

On a Wensleydale pilgrimage - geographically and back in time - to where and when epidemiology was about fieldwork (or practice) amongst real people in actual populations, and involved literally crossing fields … check out his beautifully written papers as a seasonal treat to yourself …

H0 H0 H0 😂

This headline is wrong and misleading, and the brief text below it is not much better. Whatever might constitute a full explanation of the differences between sapiens and other hominins, we remain confident that 'genes' will be central to it. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Happy holidays to all!

We’re excited to announce the "Toward Trustworthy AI Modeling for Computational Healthcare" @elsa-ai.eu workshop, a one-day in-person event focused on building private, fair, robust, reliable, and accountable AI systems for healthcare. Register now. 📅 March 9, 2026 📍 EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany

The EMDB wishes you a very Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year and we are delighted to share our jointly designed EMDB/PDBe Christmas card with you. It has been a busy year, we look forward to seeing you in the New Year here! Card: A mixture of #cryoEM and X-ray diffraction structures.

Dear UK Energy transition experts on bluesky - I read that by the end of this year there should be enough synchronous condensers for the last piece of grid services to allow fossil free operation - does anyone know if this is true? In the inevitable christmas demand dip is this likely? Or foolish?

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...

Vaults. They are cell biology's greatest puzzle! This preprint from Martin Beck's lab shows them docked on ER membranes with a ribosome inside. What on earth is going on there?? #CellBiology #WTFology www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It burns. It burns. My eyes.

I missed this the first time and lovely to see it published from Rob Finn's group and Toby Spribrille's group on the complicated (so complicated!) world of Lichens. They are complex communities which... are sort of a bit like species. (but not)

I wrote about ethnicity, genetics and football here: www.linkedin.com/posts/ewan-b...

Earliest sunset of the year today in London - for now on the evenings get longer (but the mornings getting shorter - and a bit more - until 21st)

Schwineshaxe 2025! Achievement unlocked! Plus - no need to eat for 48 hours

I was interviewed by Chirag Patel from Harvard Medical school and the Nexus exposomics project on large scale cohorts, multi-modal data, exposomics and AI. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uARz...

The Australians are fundamentally better at Cricket than the Brits (at least at the moment). Ashes away is harder for the visitors but there is too big a gap. Sigh. Lots of talk for next test for avoiding the whitewash

Just a reminder that Large Language Models is just one type of AI. It is not synonymous with AI and indeed the key aspects which make LLMs work - big attention networks, very large embedding spaces - have many applications.

Honestly, this is a great question. First off most my letters start with the fact that the people in the institution know this person better than me, and, all things being equal, trust their judgement. Then I copy and paste the criteria (always a little bit different) and answer it honestly >>

The latest update to the AlphaFold Database (AFDB) is now published in NAR. The release aligns AFDB with UniProt 2025_03 and introduces a redesigned entry page with integrated annotations, domains, summaries, and a 3D viewer. 📄 Read more: academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

This movie of a consensus model for endocytosis is very cool. This process is happening all the time in your body now...

Exciting new #Zebrafish research from the #WeinsteinLab, led by Jong Park! “Specialized gas-exchange endothelium of the zebrafish gill” — www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Amazing to see red blood cells moving through the gills! Don’t forget to check out the supplemental movies ;-)

Join EMBL's Interdisciplinary Postdoc Programme! 3 years funding, self-designed interdisciplinary project co-led between EMBL PI and PI in one of EMBL's actual, prospect or associate member states. In particular: AI&Theory, use mathem. models, physics principles and AI www.embl.org/about/info/p...

Five years ago, researchers at Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold2 go.nature.com/3M1Tvxx

Our Ensembl 2026 paper is out! Learn about 1,900+ new genomes, expanded pangenome support, new regulation interfaces, and what’s coming in our 2026 releases. doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkaf1239

Dear American friends and colleagues - I hope you have had a lovely thanksgiving. I still remember my first thanksgiving in the US - invited by some Boston Brahims worried about two young British kids having nowhere to go - and ... the food ... all the food. So much food.

NEW: Postdoc with @epetsalaki.bsky.social @juliosaezrod.bsky.social and Tamas Korcsmáros Benchmark and integrate state-of-the-art network contextualisation methods, combining large-scale transcriptomics, proteomics, and single-cell data Apply by 17 Dec embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/j...

Featuring “cameos” from Janet Thornton and yours truly from @ebi.embl.org

Last call! Applications for the @crg.eu International PhD Programme 2025 in beautiful Barcelona close next week! Join us and our inspiring colleagues at the CRG - an exceptional environment for discovery, creativity, and scientific growth. Apply here: www.crg.eu/en/content/t...