Blog post: Chance favors the (theoretically) prepared mind Data is big, machines are learning, so what good is theory anyway? Isn't most discovery driven by serendipity anyway, with theory mostly a "post-mortem"? I argue that this view discounts the value of theory. open.substack.com/pub/arjunraj...

Good review on what’s going on at NIH. “Polling consistently shows strong majorities favor federal investment in health research. The dismantling we’re witnessing is instead the result of a political moment in which a minority viewpoint holds disproportionate power.”

New preprint 🥳! We made photoclickable HaloTag ligands to precisely control protein labeling on living cells. With it, we can do some cool multicolor stuff. Huge congrats to Franzi and all co-authors! Check it out 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

While 𝘝. 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘴 max temp is around 45°C, we found 𝘐. 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘴 grows up to 63°C with optimal growth at 55-57°C🥵. We showed cellular replication via Ultrastructure Expansion Microscopy at 63°C. The previous limit for euks is 60°C!

1/5: New preprint: Cytokines control the physical state of immune tissue. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Unlike structured organs (heart, liver), immune tissue can shapeshift to form functional structures like germinal centers (GCs), tertiary lymphoid organs, granulomas, etc.

Really cool work! Congrats @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social and @cellraiser.bsky.social!

I had a great time presenting at the LLHF Annual Meeting. Lots of good feedback and lots to do!

mStayRed is right around the corner, amazing to see that an unnatural amino acid can bring the benefits of mStayGold to the red channel. Someone needs to engineer a way around the UAA and it’s game time.

Thrilled to announce the launch of my lab @cri-utsw.bsky.social at UTSW this January! We will explore how cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, focusing on membrane mechanics to reveal how tension and signaling work together to shape cell behavior.

Move over mScarlets, Crimson 🌶️ is the winner! It's the first red FP that I've found that properly trafficks to the membrane in primary myoblasts.

With some new sorbothane feet from @thorlabs.bsky.social, the Rando lab’s @cephlainc.bsky.social Squid+ is rapidly approaching its final form. We wrapped a cheap 3D printer enclosure off of Amazon with some matte black vinyl and it’s working great as a darkbox.

Hey #microscopy 🧪 folks. Have you all noticed similar dark current patterns with cameras where you have a nonlinear response to exposure time? 100ms and 1s exposures are extremely quiet but once I do a 60s exposure, certain pixels just get super bright.

Here's a six-month time-lapse of me building the single objective light sheet fluorescence microscope at the UCSF Center for Advanced Light Microscopy! Also pictured is @nicostuurman.bsky.social and @kahsage.bsky.social. #snouty

My PhD paper is in press @cellpress.bsky.social and now online: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...! Contents: weird #NPCs in yeast and flies, #CLEM, in situ #cryoET and more! Made possible by the amazing @becklab.bsky.social team at @mpibp.bsky.social and collaborators! #TeamTomo

Super excited to share our new #preprint on #BioRxiv ✨ We reveal the structural basis of a partnership between the ER membrane complex (EMC) and the P5A-ATPase Spf1 — an insertase–dislocase duo that coordinates membrane protein biogenesis and quality control. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hmm. I think there are separate--but perhaps a little overlapping--things going on here that are being somewhat conflated...

Terence Tao, youngest ever participant of the Math Olympiad, Field Medal Winner 2006, author of over 300 papers, and considered the greatest living mathematician, lost his NSF funding: mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568... 😞

Dug up an old movie of neutrophils solving a maze…it’s still so satisfying!

A recent paper reveals a surprising insight. The length of the cell cycle in a particular tissue determines the oncogenic transformation capacity of particular oncogenes, with tissues with shorter cell cycles most susceptible 3/n

The latest on the 🌊 complex from my PhD lab. Super cool experiments to unravel mechanistically how the WAVE complex templates lamellipodia in migrating cells. Congrats Muziyue!

If this all sounds like a calculated plan to reduce the size of the federally funding biomedical research enterprise, I believe that is exactly what is it. The notion that this "facilitates efficient management" of grants and the appropriation is, to use an official NIH term, horseshit. /fin

Brb cancelling all my nondisruptive science….we’re so back 🥳

Beautiful work on the development of protein kinase reporters. Congrats all! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I was feeling a bit down this Fourth of July but was reminded: “Remember, it’s the birthday of our country and its ideals, not the government or any party.” Happy Independence Day! Cheers to working together for better times ahead 🥂

The hype is real. The Quest series are crazy sensitive🔬✨

Hey optical tech dev folks: how do you do alignment? Can you outline your alignment procedures for positioning optics and verifying their correct positioning?

Super cool combination of mRNA vaccine tech with biological circuit design to kill cancer cells. The future is here folks. Can we move past small molecules?

From over 300k to less than 100k. A picture of smaller, reduced science.

Here's the NIH's proposed budget - from $48 billion to $27 billion. NIAID, current ~$7 billion cut to ~$4.2 billion. The proposed 15% cap on indirect costs remains. Again, these budgets are passed, and our leadership in science, technology, and innovation is gone. www.hhs.gov/sites/defaul...

The unintended consequence of….. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...

I’m excited to announce that my paper describing non-canonical mitotic mechanisms in the early mouse embryo is out in @science.org ! (link at end of 🧵)

Northwestern has not received any NIH funds since March. No written communication about why or what can be done. Thank you Ben Singer for raising awareness at #ATS2025

What happens to science under autocracy? The rise of the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany provides an (admittedly extreme) example. Prior to the early 1930s, scientists at German institutions won a third of Nobels. 10 years later, that number was 5%, and has never recovered.

This is absolute madness

I am thinking a lot today about how heavy things feel in my world of faculty doing scientific research. There's the immediate chaos and panic about our ability to pay people and continue our research. But there's also a deeper grief at watching everything get bulldozed for no reason

Current situation at Harvard Medical School for NIH grants view.u.hms.harvard.edu?qs=3ed8c01b9...

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

Introducing warpfield, an open source Python library for GPU-accelerated non-rigid 3D registration. Warps and aligns gigavoxel volumes within seconds (not hours). For 3D microscopy, region-to-region and cell-to-cell matching. A collaboration with @mh123.bsky.social 🚀 github.com/danionella/w...

The T grant story is even more grim. bsky.app/profile/jere...

2. "But in the month I’ve been here, I think things have turned around pretty significantly" That is also incorrect. Little has turned around in the last month at the NIH: the funding situation, both internally and externally, has only gotten worse. See total funding:

What governs where DNA replication begins in human cells? Here, we show that origins of replication in human DNA are epigenetically specified and that crucially, this epigenetic mark is required for both DNA replication and cell proliferation! @narjournal.bsky.social academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

Great thread 🧵 on how decades of scientific work had to happen for modern medicine to work its “magic” Funding basic research is an investment in our collective future well-being.

We found that cells use emergent collective memory—arising from simple chemical reactions—to outperform physical limits of detecting chemical gradients. Curious how? 1/n 8 min talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7XH... bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #biophysics #cellbiology

Using light to sculpt vertebrate development! OptoNodal2 converts patterns of illumination into patterns of morphogen signaling. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Time to catch up on the past week’s news about science and medicine in the US. Whew. 1/10

Proteins often bind targets using avidity, the combined interaction strength of multiple weak binders. Now we’ve harnessed this principle for compact, *single*-component optogenetic tools for translocation. Lead by phenom PhD student @dennishuang.bsky.social #synbiosky🧵 📝 tinyurl.com/aviatar

Interested in Developmental Mechanics??? We are organizing a mechanobiology workshop in Baeza, Spain, October 21-23, 2025. Come join us (and please help us spread the word)!!!

Do folks have a favorite tutorial for modeling potential fusion protein constructs using Alphafold or similar in silico tools? I want to see how a fluorescent protein affects the accessibility of an adjacent domain.

PRETTY AWESOME Sidor et al. PNAS take a single enzyme from a marine sponge and express it in E. coli, conferring the ability to self-assemble bioglass from silica precursors present in ocean water End result? Living, light-focusing microlenses that persist for months Cheap, durable photonics

Might be able to officially call ourselves a microscopy lab now according to the @tanner-fadero.bsky.social definition 😆