Welcome, Tony Hyman! EMBL welcomes its new Director General, Tony Hyman, as he takes up the mandate of leading EMBL's six sites. www.embl.org/news/embl-an...

Paper accepted in my inbox. WooHoo! It never, ever, gets old. Another brick in our edifice of knowledge of life and the universe, and I helped craft this brick.

We have two paid internships available in our group starting this summer, suitable for master's / pre-PhD students: - Protein structure search - Promoter variation For full details and how to apply see: www.bacpop.org/jobs/

🧬 ¡Seguimos celebrando los 25 años del Proyecto Genoma Humano! 🗣️ Descubre cómo fue la creación del primer libro de la vida, de la mano de uno de sus creadores: el Dr. @ewanbirney.bsky.social 🗓️ 08 de abril, 19h 📍 @cosmocaixa 📝 Inscripciones: cosmocaixa.org/es/p/ewan-bi... @easigen-eu.bsky.social

ChromSMF preprint is out!🚀 tinyurl.com/ChromSMF We often piece together chromatin regulation layer by layer from separate assays. But this can be limiting! In @arnaudkr.bsky.social's lab, we developed a method to directly study multiple layers on the same DNA molecule! 🧬 What does this unlock? ⬇️

The issue will be the ease of producing plausibly looking wrong or fabricated research and how to deal with it in science. Open Source software development and conference prepreints are already facing issues with poor quality submissions. But I don't think this means we should not use these models.

There is no turning back even if the models don't get any better. If you listen to interviews of top programmers, those that learned assembly back in the day, they are coding by AI. AI in science will grow, first with verifiable tasks as in Maths and assisted coding with a veriable oucomes.

Hearing about discarding data (both sequencing and imaging) "because one can re-do the experiment". This echos conversations we had over 10 years ago when NGS first arrived (europepmc.org/article/MED/...) - two thoughts as valid today as a decade ago

Arsenal. Disappointing. Well at least we know who should be our starting keeper.

We are thrilled to announce our second keynote speaker for #BOSC2026: Eric Green, the Chief Medical Officer at Illumina. Dr. Green was a key architect of the Human Genome Project and led the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) for 15 years. More info: www.open-bio.org/events/bosc-...

🧵 What does single-cell transcriptomics reveal about individual patients with acute (AKI) and chronic (CKD) kidney 🫘 disease? Can we use it to find new biomarkers? In our new preprint 👇, we asked this using biopsies from 150+ participants from the Kidney Precision Medicine Project.

Today. Come, it’s free!

🧬Continuem celebrant els 25 Anys del Projecte Genoma Humà! 🗣️Descobreix com va ser la creació del primer llibre de la vida, de la mà d'un dels seus creadors: el Dr. @ewanbirney.bsky.social 🗓️08 d'abril, 19h. CosmoCaixa 📝Inscripcions: cosmocaixa.org/es/p/ewan-bi... @easigen-eu.bsky.social #ICTSNews

The complete set of nucleobases found in terrestrial DNA and RNA — adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil — have been detected in samples returned from the asteroid Ryugu, according to research in Nature Astronomy. go.nature.com/3P9A9YN 🔭 🧪

This is a step forwards into the world of accurate complex models by AI m, at scale, openly distributed. Excellent work by the consortium here !

Oh hive mind! Can someone give an overview of the French municipal elections for English speaking outsiders? It looks … complicated

1/ Apply for an inter-disciplinary postdoc position in Heidelberg with the Health & Life Science Alliance Deadline: **31 March** Project proposals can be self-designed or adapt one of the outlines on the website ("List of project outlines for download") www.health-life-sciences.de/opportunitie...

We won à l’anglaise 😎

What a game! England took France to the edge - the absolute edge and should have won it. But. ALLEZ LES BLUES

Cancer vaccines are showing marked efficacy vs refractory cancers and are going to be part of the future Rx armamentarium. Beyond that, ultimately, for prevention in high-risk individuals. A new stellar review @naturemedicine.bsky.social nature.com/articles/s41...

New OpenFold3 preview out! (OF3p2) It closes the gap to AlphaFold3 for most modalities. Most critically, we're releasing everything, including training sets & configs, making OF3p2 the only current AF3-based model that is functionally trainable & reproducible from scratch🧵1/9

🧬 ¡Seguimos celebrando los 25 Años del Proyecto Genoma Humano! 👉 Descubre cómo fue la creación del primer libro de la vida, de la mano de uno de sus creadores: el Dr. @ewanbirney.bsky.social 🗓️08 de abril, 19h 📍CosmoCaixa 📝Inscripciones: cosmocaixa.org/es/p/ewan-bi... @easigen-eu.bsky.social

I am really delighted to be giving a talk open to the public at CosmoCaixa (science museum) in Barcelona. I will be speaking in English with simultaneous translation to Spanish and Catalan. www.cnag.eu/events/confe..., hosted by Ivo Gut and colleagues from the excellent @cnag-eu.bsky.social

Well played Italy (and Scotland!) and 6 nations truly 6 nations. England - time for a long hard look at yourself but do it for Scotland at Le crunch

Congratulations, Lisa Maier and Stephen Cusack! The two EMBL alumni have received the 2026 John Kendrew and Lennart Philipson awards for their outstanding contributions to host–microbiome research and structure-guided drug development, respectively. Learn more: www.embl.org/news/awards-...

Good morning Bermuda! Very honoured to be the inaugural recipient of the Bermuda Principles award tomorrow

Are you a computational postdoc or even in the last year of your PhD and you want to set up your own lab? Want to work in one of the most multi-disciplinary and multi-national institutions in the world? Want to be a leader in understanding biology - molecules up? Apply below!

Cheers Ewan! Was very glad to see our protein structure predictions get into EBI AFDB! Open databases FTW!

📢 We want your feedback on our new pilot project for sharing AI models in life science research. Finding, reusing and citing machine learning models remains a major challenge in the life sciences. BioAIrepo is here to help. www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/t...

I should have said, this takes us to about 2.8 million genomes in total. We don't have annotations, etc for the latest data yet, this will be an ongoing process

Mentoring doesn’t just shape careers, it shapes people’s lives. Our Director Emeritus Janet Thornton shares with @natmethods.nature.com what mentoring has meant during her career. 💬 What’s the most valuable mentoring advice you’ve received or shared? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The AlphaFold Database, jointly developed with Google DeepMind, now contains datasets from specialist communities. This includes rich datasets for microbes, viruses & parasites associated with tropical diseases. Explore the new datasets in the AlphaFold Database. www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/u...

Interested in pursuing a PhD at EMBL-EBI? @atsocf.bsky.social 🇮🇹 is one of our PhD fellows. He works on improving #AlphaFold protein structure predictions. Find out more about his PhD experience: www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/p...

Well played Scotland. Completely deserved to win that game.

Super cool work on medaka by @ewanbirney.bsky.social and colleagues www.cell.com/cell-genomic... Includes an excellent summary from Ewan via linkedin... and I maintain that 'humans aren't special' 😊 www.linkedin.com/pulse/little...

Oh Arsenal. Time dig deep and not get set back.

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.