Folddisco is now published @natbiotech.nature.com. It’s a fast motif search for similar 3D DISCOntinuous residues like catalytic sites or zinc fingers across the entire protein universe. 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💾 folddisco.foldseek.com​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ 🌐 https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco

President of MIT not mincing words today in @statnews.com www.statnews.com/2026/05/27/s...

A great opportunity! www.linkedin.com/pulse/join-u...

And it is coming from people who rail against "regulations" when up for election. Malicious, wasteful micromanagement.

New preprint. In S. sanguinis, a C5a peptidase-like protease (ScpH) polymerizes along eDNA, turning it into a catalytic biofilm scaffold. Great work from @robinanger.bsky.social in our lab, with Pelicic lab @lcbofficiel.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Doesn't it depend on whether RNA or protein levels were measured?

🚨The lab's first research paper is In Press at JBC! Congrats Liza and Magda!! Pontocerebellar Hypoplasia linked mutations of the deadenylase Target of EGR1 (TOE1) impair thermal stability, ribonuclease activity, and oligomerization - Journal of Biological Chemistry www.jbc.org/article/S002...

Out today - structure of the human HIRA histone chaperone complex bound to nucleosomes. Ever wondered how nucleosomes are assembled in the wake of transcription? It takes a 'hulk of a protein complex'. Work by the amazing Wei Tian weetian558.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵

This isn’t the ARC, but I can easily imagine it happening to an ARC scheme: The Government cancelled the Australia’s Economic Accelerator scheme, **including the round of submitted proposals currently under review**. Absolutely gutting for researchers involved. Enraging, and outrageous!

Dear Hive Mind, If we wanted to insert a 50-60 bp DNA sequence into a safe spot (or perhaps several different safe spots) in the E. coli chromosome, what would be the simplest / most straightfoward approach these days? Not a big problem if we need a marker that stays there too. Thanks!

It's already back ???? #Maythe4thBeWithYou #MayThe4th #MayTheFourthBeWithYou Well, somebody has to do it @nucleosomepolice.bsky.social 🫣 poke @markhamillofficial.bsky.social Did you know that the nucleosome inspires the Millennium Falcon design and made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs ?

Site-specific, multi-kilobase insertions and over-writes in mammalian cells, without DSBs, HDR, recombinases, integrases, transposases, or active cell cycling? Using fully or predominantly single-stranded DNA donors? 1/15

Identification of hot spring Obelisk-like RNA replicons and expanded diversity of the Obelisk superfamily #microbiology #viroid #virus #RNA #MicroSky @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Screaming to the abyss: #ColossalBio did not resurrect the dire wolf and they're probably just going to make an antelope with methemoglobinemia to give it a bluish color. Their #DeExtinction #DisInformation campaign is just a pyramid scheme because #ExtinctionIsForever 🧪

New work from Sashi Weerawarana on how TFAM compacts mitochondrial DNA 🧬 TFAM oligomerizes on DNA to form compact, homogeneous higher-order complexes (see beautiful mass photometry data below), that still retain dynamic behavior. Congratulations Sashi and Wei. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Wow, looks like a great system for RNA-guided protein binding, without repair-system-attracting unprotected displaced ssDNA! Haven't read all details yet, but I'm guessing it cleverly recognizes protein-coding regions with flexibility in the 3rd nt of each codon to make mutational escape harder?

Excited to share our new paper out today in @science.org 🎉 We show that HGT via natural competence drives diversification of chromosomal integrons in V. cholerae 🤩 Below a 🧵 on key findings incl. background on natural competence in V. cholerae 1/ #microsky #phagesky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

on polyP and carboxysomes. intriguing #MicroSky

What if AI could invent enzymes that nature hasn’t seen? 👩‍🔬🧑‍🔬 Introducing 🪩 DISCO: Diffusion for Sequence-structure CO-design 📝 Blog: disco-design.github.io 📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.05181 💻 Code: github.com/DISCO-design...

I prefer the America where people care for one another.

Do we grow wiser as we age? I spent 15+ years chasing glam journals, wasting time and energy (and frustrating my team and co-authors). I don’t want to wake up at 70 and realize my life went into convincing a few editors my work was trendy enough. Enough. I’ll try to be smarter.

Open postdoc position in my lab on HGT and interbacterial competition. We seek candidates with a PhD in microbiology (or related fields)+ strong 1st-author publications. Curious, highly motivated, and dedicated team players ready to contribute fully are encouraged to apply. Details: tiny.cc/cz01101

Still one of my all time favorites

THANK YOU!

Check out our new review on binder discovery! In a fast-moving world, here are some thoughts we have in the moment. Congrats @jzy2799.bsky.social and Eddy!! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Keystone attendees beware of this phishing scam! They've even got the correct name for the upcoming meeting that I am indeed presenting at.

Predicting protein-protein interactions (PPIs) at proteome scale can take months with co-folding models due to the massive all-vs-all comparisons required. We are excited to announce FlashPPI, a contrastive learning framework that predicts proteome wide physical interfaces in minutes. 1/🧵

How to look under the hood of protein sequence functional annotations? We have a DUF that is sometimes labeled with 2 different types of "___ase". One traces back to google's ProtNLM (natural language model) (I think), the other ... ? No clear structural homologs with experimental functions.

'Cribraria Cluster – A cluster of 1.5mm tall, immature Cribraria rufa slime moulds in ancient woodland, south Buckinghamshire, England.' Photograph: Barry Webb www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

Large Serine Integrase fans: Multiple structures of 2 different integrases, with and without their RDFs. Amazing machines, different details, same concepts! Our work on SPbeta: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Or friends' work on PhiC31: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #SyntheticBiology #phage

Jane Richardson was born #OTD in 1941 + Developed the Richardson (ribbon) diagram to represent proteins' 3D structure (becoming a standard representation for protein structures) + MacArthur Fellow, 1985 + Elected, Nat'l Academy of Sciences, 1991 + President, Biophysical Society, 2012 #WomenInSTEM

Great resource!

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Sun trying to shine through freezing fog rising from a partially- frozen Lake Michigan. Trying to come up with a political analogy about making rainbows out of less-than-pleasant circumstances, but failing, so please just enjoy the pic.

What's larger, a protein or its templating mRNA ? > The mRNA is much larger. ⬛ 𝐀 𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 -- 𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 & 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬 -- 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐮𝐥 𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡. The figure shows myoglobin protein drawn to scale next to its mRNA template. The coding sequence of an mRNA ...

🧵For those who don't know, this has been in the works for a while. There have been plans in the works to close down and consolidate some of the libraries with NASA. But the closure of the Goddard library was never part of the plan. Planning was being done to make Goddard the hub/main library.

Something hopeful to ponder

Tidied up an old desk drawer, found this. It was transcribed from a Brandeis science library bathroom wall in the 1980s:

I don't remember requests like this before! No deadline either. Have others been getting them?

A physics demo seen from Chicago this AM: steam rising from our side of Lake Michigan into sunny but frigid air, and condensing into snow clouds on the Michigan side.

Thank you for publicizing what is going on! Even us grateful NSF grantees find it hard to know.

Wonderful history, but that picture with the positive supercoiling node has always bugged me.

The top 10 people of 2025 @nature.com who shaped science. Recognizes Dr. Susan Monarez, the CDC Director who was "fired for holding the line on scientific integrity" www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

love it!

Anybody else bugged by the loose definitions in headlines like this? For example, "Breakfast cereal" could be plain oatmeal or shredded wheat, or it could be candy-in-a-bowl. They're not the same thing!

while home sick yesterday I watched a history channel thing that claimed the discovery really came from Fleming's hobby of "agar art" with different-colored bacteria. Was there any truth to that?

OMG this is amazing.

1/9 Metagenomics lets us read microbiomes in nature without cultivation, but writing (editing) them in their native context is still a major challenge. Meet MetaEdit: a platform for pathway-scale metagenomic editing inside the gut microbiome. science.org/doi/10.1126/...