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

👀

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 👇🏻

Dear scientific community, I am looking for two postdoctoral structural biologists to join my group at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru... my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

🚨 registration deadline today 9/8! 🚨

Willing to join us @pasteur.fr for a PhD for a project on how interactions between mobile genetic elements shape bacterial adaptation? Subject to be tailored to candidates with keen interest in evolution, genomics, computational biology, microbiology. Check www.pasteur.fr/en/education...

Exciting news 🎉! Notice of Award from NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) for a new instrument in the National Crystallization Center! Stay tuned for more details... hint: 🦟 🤖 @getacrystal.bsky.social

SSRL/LCLS User Meeting at SLAC is scheduled from September 21-26, 2025. Excited that the 8th iteration of Metals in Structural Biology Workshop is on Tues 9/23 (organized by Jennifer Bridwell-Rabb & myself). 🚨⏰ Registration deadline is Monday Sept 8: web.cvent.com/event/460e7d...

I’ll be taking Calgary Cal with me to conferences, meetings & data collection trips until #IUCr2026!! #WhereIsCal 🐴🗺️ ✈️🚞🚙

My quote of the day Nobody ever thanks you for saving them from the disease they didn't know they were going to get. William Foege

Great to see HeXI starting to appear on the experimental hall at @diamondlightsource.bsky.social. HeXI will be a 1 MeV electron diffraction instrument that will complement complement the capabilities of VMXm.

Cool story on the re-purposing of a protein I worked on in graduate school! Curious about other work that led to this? See: tinyurl.com/56mybjmd tinyurl.com/ksmau4xm tinyurl.com/yw9av9yh tinyurl.com/yuujhajc tinyurl.com/5987f53r Way to go Burstyn Group alumni!! And check out: tinyurl.com/mvvpzj3f

Good news! KU's IRACDA program was reinstated! We are now taking applications for postdocs. Please spread the word. sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Sear...

BIG NEWS!! We will be hiring a new professor with 25 years of endowed funding at the @biozentrum.unibas.ch @unibas.ch, focused on using biophysics and structural biology to explore climate-related fundamental science topics. Come start an innovative research cluster with us! 🧪🔬🧶🧬🌾🌍

I'm working on double checking citations for my book right now. Here is a stack of a few of the books that I read to write my narrative nonfiction book on spectroscopy:

Made it to Poznan for the European Crystallography Meeting. Looking forward to presenting at the Science Slam on Thursday with the help of my cat Rosalind. #Crystallography #ECM35 #StructuralBiology #ScienceCommunication #SciComm #ScienceSlam

Cooler mornings means sleepy bees on flowers in perfect poses

Excited to share the latest work by outstanding PhD student @kdc509.bsky.social. This was one of our first forays into experimental evolution and uncovered some cool connections between potassium transport and antimicrobial resistance in S. aureus. Major kudos to Killian!

New preprint from us! The latest part of our C. difficile vancomycin resistance story. We identified a new two-component system (VnrRS) that can control expression of the vanG pathway - just needs one amino acid change @buddlejess.bsky.social @brockhurstlab.bsky.social @claireyt.bsky.social

Join me in donating to ABRCMS. For many of us early in our careers (and for many of us now), this is THE conference. Let’s make sure future generations get the same experience. I was told if each poster judge donated $25, their goal would be quickly met, but I think we can do better! 🙏🏾💪🏾

The remainder is due to the hardworking NIH grants management specialists and program officers getting awards released now that they are allowed to do their jobs. Thanks for all of their efforts. I will continue to track this going forward... /fin

Feeling awed and a bit starstruck that @science.org chose to run a book review on #LabworkToLeadership!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Sofia Lövestam's vault structure is now online in Structure @cellpress.bsky.social. 🥳 How beautifully explorative is #cryoEM! We never planned to do this. The vaults just came down with #amyloids from human brain tissue, and Sofia decided to have a closer look. www.cell.com/structure/fu...

Do you want to analyze mass photometry (MP) count data with Python scripts? Try pyPhotoMol, a package to process, fit, and visualize the MP data 👨‍💻 github.com/osvalB/pypho... pyPhotoMol is derived from PhotoMol, our web tool for MP: spc.embl-hamburg.de/app/photoMol #massphotometry #Python #code

NIH is considering changes in supporting publication costs--some ideas are quite radical and would endanger our ability to publish at all. I don't love the cots from the big for-profits but it does cost$ to run a journal. Please repost. Comment at: osp.od.nih.gov/comment-form....

Cicada emergence

"Did I remove track changes?"

BIOCHEMISTS! We are looking for a new post-doctoral colleague at BU who will be devoted to a combination of teaching Biochemistry and engaging in Research. Ask me anything! The deadline is short, but the job is awesome. #ChemJobs You can apply here: academicjobsonline.org/ajo/BU/CH/PA...