Function of a protein: something the protein does. Function in maths: a mapping from X to Y. Function in code: re-use code to do a task. Function at a conference: have a drink and look at posters.

Proud to present our work, published today in @science.org! My deepest gratitude to @isabelesain.bsky.social, @evandeturk.bsky.social, Jennifer and our collaborators in the Doudna, Cate, Banfield, and Jacobsen labs, and the @innovativegenomics.bsky.social! I hope you enjoy reading it! ✨

📣 Join us for the next Rudolf Mößbauer Colloquium this Friday at 10 am at our institute! We are pleased to welcome @martinpacesa.bsky.social (University of Zurich)! Everyone interested is welcome to attend in person. #mpimr #maxplanck #RMC #Colloquium

The fold complexity scoring game has been updated with additional aspects of protein complexity according to suer feedback! All the scores have been recalculated and at least to me seem to correlate better with the apparent complexity of the fold! Happy voting!

Some bacteria do not live as individuals. They build multicellular filaments and connect neighboring cells through tiny cell-cell junctions. Cyanobacteria are among the most beautiful examples 😍 In our new paper, we reveal first molecuar insights on the cyanobacterial septal junction architecture 🧵

Lots of votes already! Thank you everyone! I have again updated the set of structures based on the great feedback from people. You should have an easier time voting now and it includes more interesting structures.

First update and score calibration, seems the base metric only agrees with humans 73.5% of the time! I have updated the set of structures which should make it more intuitive to vote. Hopefully we can improve the metric to a better agreement!

In the search to find a good metric for complex protein folds, the Pacesa Lab has created the FoldComplexity voting site. The results from weekly voting will be used to update subsamples of protein chains in the PDB to help better calibrate the metric. Check it out: pacesalab.com/foldcomplexity

We often talk about complex protein folds but what does that really mean? Turns out we don't have a good metric for it. So we made a game to make one! Head over to our website to vote on which fold you think is more complex and why! pacesalab.com/foldcomplexi...

My department @eth-dbiol.bsky.social at ETH Zurich is hiring for a tenured professor in mol cell bio and biochemistry (associate/full). The position is within the Institute of Biochemistry (www.bc.biol.ethz.ch) and it is fairly open within their scope of research. www.nature.com/naturecareer...

De novo designed oligomers that respond to copper, small molecules, and phosphorylation... Using a single design strategy? 🧬⚙️ 🎉 Excited to share our new bioRxiv preprint—a collaboration between the Khmelinskaia, Correia, Schoeder and a Tinnefeld labs! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The paper is out which means the MD trajectories are finally available! #MolecularNodes #b3d #GeometryNodes

AlphaFold—an AI tool that revolutionized structural biology and earned the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry—was trained on static crystal structures that dominate protein datasets. However, proteins are highly dynamic molecules. Read more: ista.ac.at/en/news/towa...

First author, ISTA PhD student Advaith Maddipatla. Co-leading authors: @alex-bronstein.bsky.social, Ailie Marx, @paulschanda.bsky.social, and @sankethvedula.bsky.social.

Our evil ORFeome paper is out! In collaboration with @alex-stark.bsky.social, we screened ~4,000 viral proteins and secreted effectors from bacteria and parasites, covering hundreds of diverse pathogens, for phenotypes in human cells.

Incredibly proud of Messi Haile @mehsehret.bsky.social, a founding member of the Ho Lab, for her beautiful work uncovering the inner workings of a central piece of the malaria parasite invasion machinery: the malarial moving junction, out today in @cellpress.bsky.social! tinyurl.com/4p3md2eb 🦠❄️🔬

I have reviewed so many of these QTY papers and even wrote an extensive rebuttal on it in our own solubilisation paper (static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10...). Making mutations and predicting WITH MSAs is NOT validation, you can predict any nonsense sequence with low RMSD with MSA enabled.

Bad timing to start my lab around the GTA VI release. At least Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 won’t come out before tenure evaluation.

Amazing stuff, what a structure! Elegant work😍

www.aeplan.co.jp/bmb2026/en/r... Register for the BMB2026 meeting in Yokohama 1-4th of December! おじかんが ありましたら、ぜひ いっぱい ごいっしょ させてください。

New Experimental Google Colab Notebook now integrates AlphaFold3 with OpenFold3 and py2Dmol: colab.research.google.com/github/sokry... (1/3)

My favourite sequential folding video, featured on the homepage

Our lab website is finally online! pacesalab.com You can find information about our research, publications, and on-going developments in the lab.

Amazing work from the Kellogg lab!! I had this kind of project in my very first 2022 professorship proposal and but never actually did it, super glad to see it can work in reality!!!

The preliminary program and registration is open for SwissPR 2026, happening in Basel at the Biozentrum on 30th June. Hear from @jpkbravo.bsky.social , Jonathan Schmid-Burgk, Julian Grünewald, @martinpacesa.bsky.social, and more. Register now at www.swisspr-symposium.uzh.ch/en.html

Thread coming later but I think people will like this!! 2 million stability measurements plus a predictive model for deltaG (not ddG)

🚨 Job Alert 🚨 In the Scientific AI Flagship @humantechnopole.bsky.social, with Philipp @3p1l.bsky.social Erdmann we are looking for: shorturl.at/Biavu "...experience in ML and CV... reliable software systems that interact with [the] real-world..." Look at the position and apply! Repost please! 🙏

European RosettaCon 2026 will bring together the field's leading voices in computational protein design, machine learning, and structural biology, for three days in Lisbon this October. Don't miss the window for early bird pricing by registering before it closes May 31.

Happy to share our latest pre-print on the Druantia defense system. We find that Type III Druantia uses a cooperative helicase-nuclease mechanism to sense and degrade replication-associated forked DNA structures. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A🧵

Years. Definitely years.

There's a growing concern that AI tools used to help produce innovative drugs could also make it easier to create new threats go.nature.com/4fhtqXx

Equivariance is dead! 😢 Or is it? 😈 Genie 3 is out! Our latest protein design model achieves SoTA results for binder design and motif scaffolding, greatly improving on BindCraft and Proteina-Complexa. It does so using all-atom SE(3)-equivariance based on a branched polymer representation👇

It is finally out there in published form. 🎉 #MicroSplit (with an 𝕊) #Microscopy 🔬 #AI 🤖 www.nature.com/articles/s41... And no paywall... so... enjoy the read! 💸 👋 This is where the post could end... but I will have to go on for a bit below... 😉 🧵

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...

We’ve got a binder in the GEM-Adaptyv RBX1 Binder Design Challenge, and it ranked #8 out of 322 tested proteins with a Kd of 570 nM. Congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to the organizers.

Thrilled with the our results with @kjamali.bsky.social and @sjorsscheres.bsky.social from the recent binder competition! 🎉 2 of our 7 designs successfully bound to the target, with affinities ranking 2nd and 3rd overall. All of these designs targeted the disordered region of the protein.

Extremely excited about the results of @adaptyv.bio RBX1 binder design competition! 𝑩𝒊𝒏𝒅𝑪𝒓𝒂𝒇𝒕2 performed very well, with 3 out of 7 designs binding to the disordered tail. Overall, only 9 binders worked out of 322 tested, 2.8% hit rate! Proud of the BC2 team ♥️ (Erik, Liza, Leo)

If you wanna try our new Autogrid High-Pressure Freezing Planchettes ❄️ - you can use the provided drawings & CAD files to produce them in-house 🛠️ - you can now also contact www.wohlwend-hpf.ch to order yours with a shiny gold-coating ✨ The preprint for instructions ➡️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧐Checkout our preprint revealing the stepwise firing💥 mechanism of a Contractile Injection System @xujwet.bsky.social&@chipericson.bsky.social trapped the complex by structure-guided engineering🧪 in multiple intermediate states and imaged them by multimodal #cryoEM❄️🔬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It looks like Anthropic has included fake paper generation in their model alignment considerations and Claude tries to avoid doing it. Maybe we need to make more noise about this in general to get the others model developers onboard with this.

1. After going back through the RELION tutorial run with Claude and correcting several issues, the reconstruction reached 2.9 Å, matching the tutorial result. The first run had given 3.22 Å, which led me to look more carefully at what had happened in the processing. So I reviewed the workflow again.

Another Friday thought. After I was cited unknowingly by some young scientists hundreds of km away 😅 (does this mean I went viral?) “AI: better make it your tool before it starts giving you the instructions”

Let’s talk about Bruno! Bruno’s lab is focused on the development and use of computational tools for the design and engineering of proteins, with the aim to develop new protein-based therapeutics, vaccines, biosensors and more. Learn more about Bruno in our April 2026 newsletter. zurl.co/X2o4z

New preprint 🚀 ❄️ We developed Autogrid-compatible HPF planchettes that enable direct freezing of clipped EM grids and streamline integration with cryo-FIB workflows ✔️ improved grid stability ✔️ reduced handling ✔️ robust vitrification (🦠 🧫 🧠) A step toward routine HPF for complex samples #teamtomo

Calling all xray structure folks that have worked with denovo proteins. Do you suffer from high rfactors? Myself, someone else I know and now multiple structures all seem to suffer from this. Assuming we all tried our best in model building, what could be some causes?

The CASP experiment is about to start - and is still short on challenging prediction targets. Ligand complexes, RNA, …