2026 has been a remarkable year for me so far (despite the current world events): opening my lab at the University of Zurich, assembling an amazing group of people in the group, and celebrating it with a fantastic lab warming party. Figured it's also time for a small profile refresh.

With Eugene Koonin, we propose a concept of “the selfish ribosome”, under which evolution of life is viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensures the propagation of the ribosome. arxiv.org/abs/2602.23268

Such a good read 👏👏👏

The most important #RNA conference of the year with lots of amazing science and a really friendly atmosphere. This year in beautiful Montreal 🇨🇦 ! www2.rnasociety.org

Please spread the word: the Structural Studies Division @mrclmb.bsky.social is looking for a new tenure-track, independent group leader with an exciting plan in any area of Structural (Molecular & Cell) biology, in discovery biology and/or methods development. 🥳 mrc.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/...

New paper from my group in @science.org : "A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesise itself and its complementary strand" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Outstanding work by @edogia.bsky.social

In 2017 we showed that homomers evolve on the edge of supramolecular self-assembly. Here we show how to exploit this vulnerability so that ALL homomers can become bona fide drug-🎯. Delighted that Aim 3 of our @erc.europa.eu finally polymerized! Manuscript: 👉 rdcu.be/e27bT

Introducing The Structural History of Eukarya (SHE): The first proteome-scale phylogeny constructed entirely from 3D structure. We computed 300 trillion alignments across 1,542 species to map the tree of life. 🧵👇 (1/5)

Bluesky doesn’t really shine yet as a place to discover papers, especially at the intersection of biology and ML. To help a little, I’m going to start sharing papers I find interesting. To kick things off, here’s one from @petar-v.bsky.social and colleagues at DeepMind arxiv.org/abs/2601.22950

🗓️ Save the Date! The 5th European RosettaCon – Crossing Boundaries with Protein Design will take place in Lisbon, Portugal 🇵🇹 🗓️ October 28–30, 2026 Join the protein design community for an inspiring scientific meeting at the intersection of innovation and design.

Here are the success rates of de novo pipelines based on which designs I could actually identify the methods for.

Huge congratulations @nboyd.bsky.social with Mosaic that absolutely killed in the competition! 𝑩𝒊𝒏𝒅𝑪𝒓𝒂𝒇𝒕2 did also pretty well with the second highest hit rate in the competition! proteinbase.com/collections/...

My time in @martinsteinegger.bsky.social's group is ending, but I’m staying in Korea to build a lab at Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine. If you or someone you know is interested in molecular machine learning and open-source bioinformatics, please reach out. I am hiring! mirdita.org

🔬 Postdoc position – Infection Biology & Cryo-ET (Zurich) 🇨🇭 We are looking for a motivated Postdoc to join our interdisciplinary team. 📩 Interested? Check out the job advert: www.imm.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:cb17... 👉 More info on the lab: www.weiss-laboratory.com Please share with interested colleagues!

Perfect birthday gift 🙌 happy this one is out!

Fully circular double rainbow appeared today while snowboarding

Super excited about our 𝑩𝒊𝒏𝒅𝑪𝒓𝒂𝒇𝒕 pipeline being highlighted as one of @twistbioscience.com favourite publications of 2025! We did synthesize all binder genes with Twist ❤️

Repeat after me: GENE 👏 EXPRESSION 👏 PROFILING 👏 DOES 👏 NOT 👏 A 👏 VIRTUAL 👏 CELL 👏 MAKE 👏

I've been thinking about the "virtual cell" concept and wanted to write up a few thoughts. Specifically on how I think the prior experience in GWAS informs the most likely way these models will be useful. andrewcarroll.github.io/2025/12/23/t...

JOB ALERT: Operations Director (DCI–Lausanne). The DCI, a joint initiative of EPFL, UNIL, UNIGE and UNIBE, is recruiting an Operations Director to lead the cryo-EM facility in Lausanne. 📩 Questions: CEO of the DCI: @chgenoud.bsky.social 🔗 Apply here: careers.epfl.ch/job/Lausanne...

Are you interested in integrative structural biology, but feel a bit lost? Don't worry, we have you covered with our FEBS Advanced Course, Lost in Integration Vol. 2 — probing biomolecules with AI and experiments probingbiomolecules2026.febsevents.org network.febs.org/posts/integr...

This is an amazing position, DCI Lausanne is looking for a new director! It is one of the best cryoEM centers out there, with an fantastic infrastructure and some of the most exceptional experts in microscopy that I ever had the chance to work with! careers.epfl.ch/job/Lausanne...

🚨 Today, I formally introduced articles of impeachment against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. RFK Jr. has turned his back on science and the safety of the American people. Michiganders cannot take another day of his chaos.

Excited to share our first work on protein design! Huge thanks to the entire team, and especially to Bel, Evan, to the Doudna, Jacobsen, Cate, Banfield labs, all co-authors, and my D-lab mates! 💫

Es ist gar hübsch von einem großen Herrn, So menschlich mit dem Teufel selbst zu sprechen.

oh, this is nice: x.com/proteinbase/.... only a few lines of code…

And now it's going to get cut.

Let's do some community voting on some of the coolest binder designs against the Nipah virus in the @adaptyvbio competition! I think I am definitely going to favour wacky designs... proteinbase.com/competitions...

📢 We have multiple open PhD positions to study bacterial immune systems using cutting-edge cryo-EM, microbiology, and biochemistry in our group! Join us and uncover how bacterial defenses eliminate predators and engineer next-gen biotech tools. 🔥 Apply by Jan 8, 2026 Details: phd.pages.ista.ac.at

Been excited about this one for a while! What would you do with a new alphabet and the wealth of protein sequence bioinformatics at your disposal? We're also around at #EMBOComp3D Heidelberg and MLSB Copenhagen this week to discuss

The Tiger Lillies Billy Talent System of a Down The Offspring Blink 182

ProteinCHAOS runs entirely in the browser and lets you choose how to visualize your protein structures. It supports PDB files from the PDB and AlphaFold servers and offers several visual themes so you can "paint" abstract art with protein traces. I hope it helps you create some interesting images!

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

Very happy to share our collaborative project on FAM118 proteins - noncanonical sirtuins that form filaments and process NAD in human and other vertebrate cells.

Very happy to be this year’s recipient of the 𝗣𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗹 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗹𝗵𝗼𝗿𝗻 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 together with @jenspuschhof.bsky.social www.engelhorn-stiftung.de/forschungspr...

The Center for Microscopy and Image Analysis at the University of Zurich is seeking a new Head: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie... It is super fun to work with them, tons of expertise and cutting edge instrumentation in ❄️🔬 Application deadline: December 15, 2025.

After 5 years of waiting, the new #CRISPR classification by Makarova et al. is out @natmicrobiol.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

With the US government absent from the COP30 global climate summit, it will be up to others to avert catastrophe go.nature.com/4ofcrH6

So exciting to be able to do a binder design workshop using BindCraft in Mexico 🇲🇽, with such a fantastic community of scientists! The designs to probe interesting biological problems looked amazing! The GPU compute was very generously provided by @aaronmring.bsky.social and AriaX.bio 🖥️

OpenFold3-preview (OF3p) is out: a sneak peek of our AF3-based structure prediction model. Our aim for OF3 is full AF3-parity for every modality. We now believe we have a clear path towards this goal and are releasing OF3p to enable building in the OF3 ecosystem. More👇

BIG BIG congratulations to our PhD student @roman-bushuiev.bsky.social for receiving the Google PhD Fellowship 2025 in Health Research! 🎉💰 goo.gle/43wJWw8

We (@sobuelow.bsky.social) developed AF-CALVADOS to integrate AlphaFold and CALVADOS to simulate flexible multidomain proteins at scale See preprint for: — Ensembles of >12000 full-length human proteins — Analysis of IDRs in >1500 TFs 📜 doi.org/10.1101/2025... 💾 github.com/KULL-Centre/...

Biology is much more complicated than most non-biologists can imagine. And AI is not going to change this anytime soon. blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

I wrote a blog post about the future of structural bioinformatics. Where to go after AlphaFold? How do we avoid the field becoming a load of half-baked LLMs? Let me know what you think. jgreener64.github.io/posts/struct...

Skeetorial on our BRAF preprint! tinyurl.com/asymmBRAF The RAS->RAF->MEK->ERK cascade carries mutations in most human cancers. Interestingly, although we have three RAF paralogues (A, B and C), it is the BRAF that is predominantly mutated in cancer patients. (1/10)

Thrilled to announce our new preprint, “Protein Hunter: Exploiting Structure Hallucination within Diffusion for Protein Design,” in collaboration with @Griffin, @GBhardwaj8 and @sokrypton.org 🧬Code and notebooks will be released by the end of this week. 🎧Golden- Kpop Demon Hunters

Any structural biologists who want some fun? Try building mirror folds. When you’re building them you seriously innately feel like this is “off” but they do exist! When I looked at some of these datasets and deciding which way to turn in Coot it was so offsetting www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Homology modeling

All that my office requires for now is a good tea preparation station

Super happy to start my new position back at the beautiful University Zurich Irchel campus. Will spend some time building up the lab, and then jump into doing some super cool science very soon!