For years, the #cryoEM community viewed ~50 kDa as the practical lower size limit for SPA. This was challenged by Kim et al., who introduced the HR-HAIR method and demonstrated structure determination of proteins below 30 kDa using #CryoSPARC. Read more 👉 bit.ly/3RHMxAt

📢Faculty Position in Nucleic Acid Based Nanomedicine Available! 📆Apply by September 15! ubc.wd10.myworkdayjobs.com/ubcfacultyjo...

Dual-channel Cx46/50 gap junction assemblies in a shared lipid-nanodisc = lipid-mediated packing and a lipid site near the NT gating region that is absent from single channels. Plus a 1.8 Å open-state single-channel benchmark! #cryo-EM 🍩’s #NIH-funded-research www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Big congrats to Yuchen Xu for leading the lab's first preprint!! And many thanks to @uwbiochem.bsky.social for their support! preprint: shorturl.at/ubA65 code: github.com/WaymentSteel... colab: shorturl.at/eSbQK

In the W-S lab's first preprint, we describe how genomic language models know something about RNA thermodynamics. Though we think this is cool, things get tricky! A growing practice for interpreting LMs is to perturb input tokens, often called "Categorical Jacobian": 👇

Save the date: the 26th Annual Midwest DNA Repair Symposium heads to Indiana, June 4 to 6, 2027. See you there.

Hello #world, meet 1,000× Expansion Microscopy. A small gel would grow to the size of an Olympic swimming pool, while amino-acid-scale distances become visible with ordinary light microscopy. Led by Helena Hu from @eboyden3.bsky.social's lab, in collab with us. Story: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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🚨Faculty job search: University of Illinois Chicago Micro & Immuno department is hiring! Open rank and open area within host-pathogen interactions. Apply by May 31 to join us in UI College of Medicine in the heart of Chicago! uic.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Sub-2 Å cryo-EM structures of transcribing RNA polymerase II reveal critical roles of water molecules in catalysis

Are you analysing hydrophobicity in disordered proteins and still using the Kyte & Doolittle scale? Maybe instead consider the "stickiness-scale" that Fan & Giulio derived using SAXS data for >100 IDPs doi.org/10.1021/acs....

Mapping RNA structure assembly and remodeling in biomolecular condensates https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.21.726738v1

One, perhaps two, of our postdocs are moving on to faculty positions this year (more news soon!). While they're truly irreplaceable, it does mean that we have openings for new members to join our team studying #cilia. If interested, please apply: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15526

Great piece and cover @science.org about how our field is uncovering the evolutionary and mechanistic connections between bacterial and eukaryotic immunity ! www.science.org/content/article/ancient-wars-between-microbes-gave-us-key-immune-defenses

Game over, phylogeneticists! New DNA foundation model "Carbon" reconstructs the tree of life. 🙃 huggingface.co/spaces/Huggi...

Happy to share our collaborative project with Stephane Marcand, on the protective role of Rap1 at telomeres. It turned out that our favorite protein, MRX, has the ability to measure telomere length, and activate response pathways when telomeres become too short. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy to reveal our latest work, Microbe-Independent Deep Assembly and Screening (MIDAS), a method for engineering proteins >10x more cheaply and quickly than before. MIDAS addresses the slowest step in protein engineering — construction and expression of variants — by skipping cloning entirely

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... 🧵

Congratulations to Sourav Agrawal, who was awarded a Louis and Elsa Thomsen Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship from @uwmadisoncals.bsky.social! His research in the @cijilim.bsky.social Lab focuses on telomeres. Learn more: biochem.wisc.edu/2026/04/28/s...

For 40 years the 8-nt ‘Kozak Sequence’ was thought to mark sites of translation initiation. In a new study, we revise this model by identifying an ~80-nt sequence—the extended Translation Initiation Sequence (eTIS)— that guides ribosomes to correct start sites. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We invented “triplet tumbling microscopy” (TTM) to track protein-protein interactions in living cells! Tag your protein with GFP and see it interact with *untagged* binding partners www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Congratulations to Tyler Ramos, who received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship this year! Ramos is a graduate student in the LaFoya Lab. Learn more: biochem.wisc.edu/2026/04/21/2...

1/9 New preprint from the Sternberg Lab in collaboration with the Nishimasu Lab! We uncover how the DRT3 antiphage immune system pairs two reverse transcriptases, one RNA-templated and one protein-templated, to build a double-stranded DNA effector. doi.org/10.64898/202...

The 11th International #teamtomo Congress is coming to Madison, Wisconsin! As a proud Madison native, I can confirm: August 9–12 is peak Wisco weather ☀️ stoked for exciting science, friendly people, and warm nights @ the Union Terrace Abstract deadline: May 14 cryoem.wisc.edu/11th-interna...

Meet Wei Guo from @uwmadisoncals.bsky.social‬ who works to understand the posttranscriptional process and RNA metabolism in muscle structure and function, specifically in heart muscle diseases and skeletal muscle hypertrophy and regeneration.

Post doc ad now live. - vai.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/VAICar...

Job navigation in table view, searchable tags, 3D mesh optimized for masks, and many more features! 👉👉👉 github.com/hanjinliu/hi... Let's make our RELION directory a better place.

Breaking news: Indiana University plant microbiologist Roger Innes has been locked out of his laboratory by the school in response to a request by one of his federal funders. The move comes after Innes complained about the government’s prosecution of Chinese postdocs. https://scim.ag/4tsDqRr

Abstract deadline approaching (May 24) for FASEB Dynamic DNA Structures in Scottsdale, AZ July 19-24. This is a not-to-miss conference if you're interested in the intersection of nucleic acid structures and human health. Speaking slots still open! Please repost. events.faseb.org/event/Dynami...

Sad news - he certainly was a towering figure with many influential discoveries - see below. Why he was never awarded the 'big' prize is truly baffling, but his many contributions to science will be remembered much longer than any prize. Thank you @alexis-verger.cpesr.fr for putting this together.

Did you know that Pierre Chambon's laboratory was the first to use the term "nucleosome" in 1975 ? www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

With a few days since it's been out @keribackus.bsky.social @oligopain.bsky.social and I wanted to highlight a few of our favorite aspects of POCA for photocatalytic proximity labeling of DNA, RNA or proteins. (1) POCA builds on standard in situ hybridization and immunofluorescence workflows.

MicroSplit: a computational unmixing method for multiplexed fluorescence imaging of up to 4 structures per imaging channel. @ashesh-0.bsky.social @florianjug.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper out! Left-handed DNA cannot bind to natural, right-handed DNA. This leads to lower background if it is used as a probe in DNA-PAINT. Using Fluorigenic DNA-PAINT with left-handed DNA allows for low background, fast 3D DNA-PAINT! Congrats, Bas! skeetorial: 1/x pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

We're super excited to share MissAlignment: a new ML-based approach to reference-free tilt series alignment, spearheaded by @martenchaillet.bsky.social. We think it's going to make your cryo-ET life a lot better. Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Code: github.com/warpem/miss-... 🧶 Thread:

Amazing event @vilcekfoundation.bsky.social. so honored to be a part of this fantastic group of artists and scientists!

Excited to see this collaborative work with @oligopain.bsky.social and @keribackus.bsky.social out as a preprint now! Took a ton of work from a great team of scientists @uwgenome.bsky.social and #UCLA The imaging coupled with proteomics open our eyes to new aspects of subcellular organization!

Online Now: Sub-2 Å cryo-EM structures of transcribing RNA polymerase II reveal critical roles of water molecules in catalysis Online now:

I don’t know how to feel about grant rejections anymore. When you get a score that would have been funded at any other point in history, except right now, how bad can you feel? I see scores from friends and colleagues (and my own) and it just breaks my heart more than anything.

The 2027 Biophysical Society #CryoEM Subgroup welcomes nominations for the June Almeida Award for Mid/Senior-Career Women in CryoEM. The nomination deadline is November 13, 2026, but feel free to submit nominations anytime. Eligibility & requirements found here: www.biophysics.org/Awards-Fundi...

I am not involved in this hiring process, just spreading word via the science network: The Barrick lab at MSU is looking for a new lab manager. This is a microbiology lab with interests in evolution and bioinformatics, and it's the newish home of the famous Long Term Evolution Experiment.

The past, present and future of de novo protein design www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I am happy to share a review I recently wrote on the design of peptide binders. It gives an overview of experimentally validated tools and discusses the challenges of why peptide design is more difficult than the design of classical protein binders. www.chimia.ch/chimia/artic...

Finally, meet the scientist that made MagLuc: Paula Wagner at @nonfictionlabs.bsky.social ! (with @mariaingaramo.bsky.social and @fuisz.bsky.social of course). Paula did all this work in less than a year. She's awesome, and I'm deeply impressed.

We will host a ~30-45 min webinar introducing EM-server for cryo-EM structure modeling on May 6 (Wed) 12:30pm (Eastern Time). Will introduce DAQ-Score plugin & CryoZeta. EM-Server: em.kiharalab.org Registration link: kiharalab-events.vercel.app Hope to see you there!

J. Craig Venter, Scientist Who Decoded the Human Genome, Dies at 79 A risk-taking outsider, he brought speed, competition and controversy to one of science’s biggest races. #GiftLink Nicholas Wade writes @NYtimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/s...

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

Meet MagLuc: a magnetically-controlled luminescent protein. This is a foundational tool for remote control of biological processes, also known as "magnetogenetics". Can you tell when the magnetic field turns on and off? From @mariaingaramo.bsky.social and the team at @nonfictionlabs.bsky.social

First-ever preprint from our lab, describing evidence that the RPA-Trt1-Tpz1 complex contributes to telomerase activation in fission yeast. This story began when Yong-jie Xu from Wright State University sent us a collection of 25 Replication Protein A subunit Ssb1 (RPA1) mutants in 2021.

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...