Oh, wow. We really need a coelacanth genome so we can look at Hox gene expression here. Or are non-homeobox genes at play?

As 2025 comes to a close, wishing a Happy New Year from the National Crystallization Center! 💎❄️💎❄️💎❄️💎❄️💎❄️ www.getacrystal.org

Read the preprint !!! doi.org/10.64898/202...

My final takeaway: it is way easier to generate predictions at scale than to make measurements at scale. But to know which methods make predictions worth following, we are going to need to make a lot more measurements like the ones done here!

I'm really excited to break up the holiday relaxation time with a new preprint that benchmarks AlphaFold3 (AF3)/“co-folding” methods with 2 new stringent performance tests. Thread below - but first some links: A longer take: fraserlab.com/2025/12/29/k... Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Best two minutes of your day. Trust me.

Your annual reminder that: - when submissions peak, editors may become more selective in what they send out for peer review, and - submissions peak right before Christmas Make of that what you will.

Perfect #caturday story - a vanished cat (found), art & music. Charming! ❤️🐈🎨

NSF bio hour - NSF BIO lost 40% of its staff 😑

From 3 reviews per proposal - down to at least 2 reviews. BIO will still strive to have 3 reviews per proposal.

BIO reorganization: Foundations of life Living systems Bioinnovation and infrastructure "Science we are interested in has not changed"

Come to Buffalo & be my colleague! The Department of Biochemistry at Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo is seeking applications at the Assistant or Associate Professor level. We have a collegial & active department!!

New interview alert! We had a chat with Mike Cianfrocco, Scott Stagg and Jan-Hannes Schäfer about their CryoSift tool – details in the thread. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROlc...

Confused by all the histones that are cropping up in organisms that are decidedly NOT eukaryotes? check out our review - fantastic work by team NucEvo in the #Lugerlab The Expanding Histone Universe: Histone-Based DNA Organization in Noneukaryotic Organisms - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Garden & outdoorsy folk, please spread this news: The great people at Monarch Watch have a program where schools, nonprofits & large restoration projects can apply for FREE MILKWEED (only thing Monarch caterpillars eat, can't have too much of it IMO). Check it out! monarchwatch.org/bring-back-t...

"there's a new serif in town"

In honor of the Secretary of Transportation I will be wearing my PJs while traveling today

Hey friends. I’m looking for a postdoc interested in studying host-pathogen interactions and immunology of tuberculosis. Send me some good people! We have a great group here! Email me [email protected]. Thanks!

there's a reason we have less chronic hepatitis B infections in the USA -

🎉 So excited for the new instrumentation in the National Crystallization Center! We can't wait to set up new crystallization 💎 experiments with the new 🦟 🤖! 📷 @gabbygrowsxtals.bsky.social, Tiffany Wright & @mirandalynchphd.bsky.social - instrument in 📦. www.getacrystal.org @ubuffalo.bsky.social

What coding with an LLM feels like sometimes.

If you'd like to celebrate the biology of viruses - or the fight against viral diseases - this winter, try out our free and updated #VirusSnowflake designs. Please share, and if you have any photos of Virus Snowflakes in your area it would be lovely to see them! cvr-engagement.co.uk/virus-snowfl...

Happy 100th, structural biology pubs.aip.org/aca/sdy/arti... Delightful perspective by George Phillips and Ed Lattman. Have a piece of cake everyone.

I have posted about this before, but... Researchers at Pitt School of Public Health (with NIH funding) developed Project Tycho where they digitized reportable disease data from across the country going back to ~1900. graphics.wsj.com/infectious-d... 1/6

Are you looking for female speakers in CryoEM for seminars and conferences? Are you a woman in CryoEM and not yet on the ‚woman in CryoEM‘ list? Find your speakers and add/update name and affiliation! docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

A new Review discusses how degrons of different types, with an emphasis on high-order structural ones, regulate substrate-E3 interactions and how their dysregulation is linked to human diseases www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here's a big thank you to everyone at NIH who is trying to get everything regarding grants and reviews re-started!!!

@gabbygrowsxtals.bsky.social Operations Manager in the @getacrystal.bsky.social & Research Scientist extraordinaire in my research group, is a candidate to join the Communications Committee for ACA @acastructuralsci.bsky.social!! 👩🏻‍🔬 🧪 🔬 💎 🎙️ Vote in ACA election by tomorrow 11/14!

CSR, which handles this process, is no doubt missing a lot of employees due to the doge shenanigans. Be patient (I remind myself) if your #NIHgrant application remains in limbo for a few weeks.

The NIH passed three major #NIHGrant submission deadlines during the shutdown with a fourth hitting on Monday. There is a huge backlog of proposals needing to be referred to study sections and ICs for potential funding.

The Leading Edge Fellows gathered this week to celebrate Zara Weinberg, a beloved member of our community. Our 7th cohort of Leading Edge Fellows (2026) will be named in her honor. The Zara Weinberg Leading Edge Cohort application is now open! Due Feb 2. www.leadingedgesymposium.org/apply/

The National Crystallization Center is hiring for two positions: a research scientist position focused on progressing our crystallization optimization projects, and a research support specialist to support operations of the Crystallization Center!

New lab preprint! @zestytoast.bsky.social tagged a scarce mycobacterial protein in M. smegmatis with TwinStep but got… something? @kjamali.bsky.social's ModelAngelo built models & @martinsteinegger.bsky.social's FoldSeek IDed them as the biotin-containing MCC & LCC complexes 🧵 tinyurl.com/ukny4ptz

Interested in Biological Macromolecules? IUCr2026 has you covered with NINETEEN symposia, including cryoEM/cryoET innovations; membrane proteins; protein design/engineering; drug discovery; 21st century structural enzymology; and more! Join us in Calgary: event.fourwaves.com/...

Sorry spider haters, but this was just the most beautiful beast & I knew (nearly everyone) would need to see it 😉. It sat frozen, up on its toes, on the edge of Leeman (WA) salt lake while I took pics. Unfortunately it was too big (body length 1.4cm) for my lens. #spider #Lycosidae #Tetralycosa

Nominations for the June Almeida award for Mid/Senior-Career Women in Cryo-EM are now open! Submit your nomination via this link www.biophysics.org/awards-fundi... by November 14th to recognize an exceptional woman in our community.

Last week I was thrilled to attend the 2025 Pittsburgh Diffraction Conference hosted at @brookhavenlab.bsky.social! Thanks for the invitation to speak in the ‘Metal Matters’ session @Sarah Perry!! Meeting attended by Calgary Cal 🐴 #WhereIsCal @iucr2026.bsky.social

My HPLC was definitely overlooked www.nature.com/articles/d41...

This is incredibly beautiful, and the fact that the resolution is sufficient to follow the path of DNA spooling inside the virion head and through the tail is amazing

Last week the SSRL/LCLS Annual User Meeting at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory had a record turnout for a week of workshops, talks, posters, networking, and 🔥 science! 🧪 💎 🔬💡 Meeting attended by Calgary Cal 🐴 #WhereIsCal #IUCr2026

🚨💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎🚨 Reservation deadline for the October 2025 high-throughput crystallization screen at the National Crystallization Center is today Friday October 3! www.getacrystal.org

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Stay tuned - Calgary Cal and I got delayed at O’Hare but we are in route to the SSRL/LCLS User Meeting! ✈️🧪🔬💎 #WhereIsCal #IUCr2026

Fun Friday update from the lab - Chris Campomizzi won a David Goodsell print for filling the @acastructuralsci.bsky.social Annual Meeting survey! How cool is that!! 💎🎨✅

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac... A host organelle (in sea slugs) integrates stolen chloroplasts for animal photosynthesis

A huge shoutout to all the dedicated grants management specialists at the NIH who are working around the clock to push grants out before the Sep 30 deadline. And also to the POs responding to frantic emails. Not an easy job under the best of circumstances and right now it's the pits. Thank you!

Seconded. For those of us watching closely, it's a massive and impressive effort in the face of strong headwinds.

This one is a bit of a departure from the usual and definitely a work in progress! We found that by using ab initio reconstruction at very high res, in very small steps, we could crack some small structures that had eluded us - e.g. 39kDa iPKAc (EMPIAR-10252), below. Read on for details... 1/x

Really incredible effort by the indefatigable @nurseteria.bsky.social to raise awareness of what we are going to bring back by stripping access to vaccination 👇🏻