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/...

Awesome paper from Kathy Collins' lab Different repair pathways support intact or truncated insertions by R2 retrotransposon protein | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

way to go @cnn.com to put this little tidbit of info behind a paywall.

👏 👏 👏 www.wunc.org/education/20...

Postdoctoral fellowship opportunity at the U of Chicago: biologicalsciences.uchicago.edu/research/chi...

I love AlphaFold—but please include PAE (Predicted Aligned Error) plots for every “interaction.” Pretty PDBs ≠ proof. If the PAE doesn’t show an interface, it ain’t one. Show the plots. Structural biology's reputation is on the line.

Might not be the best use of limited funds, depending on what the structurally-based quesiton was!

Congrats to @utah.edu's Wes Sundquist on the cool honor. Had a chance to chat with him a few times when I was in college and he just came off as such a smart and humble guy. attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff...

Really cool! But Bluesky has flipped your picture over - it now shows positively supercoiled left-handed DNA :-(.

Happy to share a new publication on Mechanistic Coupling of Enzyme Activities at the Replisome in JBC. We #Traklab compare and contrast strategies used across organisms to coordinate the many enzymatic processes that occur during DNA replication. Hope it is helpful. doi.org/10.1016/j.jb...

Scientists often engineer microbes, like E. coli, to make drugs and other molecules. But what if, instead, we could isolate ALL the components of a cell into little vials and sell them? How much would, say, 1 liter of cells be worth? The answer, it turns out, is about $600,000.

This could be a metaphor for so many things in society, international relations, etc ...

1/3 To those interested in microbial iron & metal transport: In 1992, the late JB Neilands (UCB), the pioneer in the study of Fe transport entrusted me with his collection of purified siderophores from a wide range of microbes—many of them unique chemical species that can no longer be reproduced

I don’t know who needs to hear this but the CDC is being eviscerated right now. America is not going to have any kind of outbreak response capacity after tonight. Americans’ health data is no longer secure. Say goodbye to federal public health in any capacity. It’s a disaster. We won’t recover.

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

🚨 Are you an alum from one of the 9 universities Trump is attempting to extort right now? ✍️ Sign this petition to defend your university, free speech, and democracy. I signed. This is a time for courage, not capitulation. #JustSayNo #Compact 🧪🧠🧬 (context in thread)

The Peters lab is looking for a new team member! The role transposons play in evolution, basic mechanisms regulating transposition, and applying transposons as tools for genome modification with a special focus on guide RNA-directed transposition. cornell.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/CornellCaree...

Interested in a tenure track position teaching and doing research with undergrads at a PUI? We are looking for a broadly-defined microbiologist who can teach Med Micro and Immunology. Apply at universityofscrantonjobs.com/postings/8308. Pls share widely to feeds (& on twitter if you still tweet)! 🦠

If you've got kids in the Chicago area, come to the South Side Science Fest on Saturday! southsidescience.event.uchicago.edu?utm_source=H...

First publication from our lab!

Heads up: ignore samtools dot org, similarly minimap2 dot com and likely others. It's owned by a known phishing site and while the binaries they offer look valid currently (but note they may be serving us different binaries to others), that could change. Ie: it's not us (Samtools team)! Be warned

Does anyone know a gene in E. coli that duplicated "fairly recently", as to compare and contrast it's sequence divergence with that found in mobile elements? #sciencesky #microsky

These are the most challenging times for early-career scientists and engineers. My team is doing its bit to help by maintaining and even expanding our database of funding opportunities for early-career researchers. We found 437 of them. Download it freely here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

New Notice about No-Cost Extensions... grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

reposting from a different social media site: mobilednajournal.biomedcentral.com/editors-picks Featuring cutting-edge work on TE evolution, function & regulation. #TEs #MobileDNA

Looking forward to this new installment of the Woods Hole Mobile DNA Meeting! Fantastic program, laid-back atmosphere, and gorgeous setting at the Marine Biological Laboratory ⛵️🪼🐋 Abstract submission closes Aug 7 but registration after that date is possible. www.eventsquid.com/event.cfm?ev...

I NEED to tell you the story of Tae Heung “William” Kim. He's a graduate student at Texas A&M where he's working on a vaccine for Lyme disease. He's a *legal permanent resident* of the United States. And he's been in ICE detention for 12 days & counting, transferred Tuesday to South Texas.

only 17??