Meanwhile Robin Ince genuinely has been cancelled for daring to voice his opinions and for defending trans people.

Where's the outrage from the "cancel culture" lot?

What are the Free Speech Union doing to help him?

Professor Mark Buttner

NEWS - Professor Mark Buttner receives Marjory Stephenson Prize 2026

Professor Buttner, one of our Emeritus Fellows, has received the @microbiologysociety.org Marjory Stephenson Prize for 2026. Congratulations Mark! 👏

Read about his exceptional research and career: www.jic.ac.uk/news/profess...

Gaza health ministry says 33 people dead from malnutrition in last 48 hours New figures from the Hamas-run ministry include 12 children who have died, as the UN says Israel must allow aid into Gaza.

People are starving to death, or being gunned down while desperately trying to access food at aid sites — even journalists are in grave danger. This abhorrent situation cannot be allowed to continue

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cv...

This is not the time to step back from diversity, equity, and inclusion Recently, I exchanged views with a prominent Ivy League scientist who was complaining about the minority students and junior faculty applying to his program. He claimed that the university, through di...

Thanks for your advocacy and this excellent letter, @anthrofuentes.bsky.social !

Also, wasn’t particularly fast!

Cycling achievement unlocked: Strava “excluding” my ride as its rubbish AI can’t believe I could ride this fast 😂

Or why Nocardia harbour massive multi-domain proteins that may be over 50,000 AAs (5.6 MDa!) in some cases with no known function for the organism? Bigger than titin and PKZillas. Should stop this procrastination 😅

New grant application: "Ignorance is a really good reason for you to give me some funding, please"

It always pleases me to see how little we know. I can pick a random ~700 AA protein from a bacterial genome and it has no conserved domains and no characterised structural homologues, yet there are >1000 homologues across diverse Gram+ and Gram- bacteria.

Hungary banned Pride marches. This is the response ✊🏳️‍🌈

Super happy to see our work on lydiamycin biosynthesis, structure and function published in @pnas.org 😀
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The work is described in the thread below, where we use BGC info to guide the discovery of multiple key features of this antibiotic.
@johninnescentre.bsky.social

Returning home after a fun couple of days in London at the RSC Chemical Biology Symposium and then the Chemical Biology Interface Council meeting. Excellent talks and always a joy to return to Burlington House @rsc.org

Happy Tuesday to everyone apart from whoever approved this awful design! Annoys me every time I use Greater Anglia.

Join us for the RSC Chemical Biology Leadership Retreat for Early Career Researchers! This is designed for researchers within 5 years of their first independent position. Bursuries are available (details in link below).

Venue: Imperial College London
Date: 10-12 Sep 2025
www.rsc.org/events/detai...

Postdoctoral Researcher (Faulkner Group) | John Innes Centre An exciting opportunity has arisen for a Postdoctoral Researcher to join the Faulkner Group at the John Innes Centre, working on cutting-edge science in the field of Cell & Developmental Biology.

We're looking for a postdoc to join the lab to work on cell-to-cell communication via the apoplast. Candidate must be brave, as they will have to lead us (me) away from the plasmodesmata-lands we've inhabited for so long!

www.jic.ac.uk/vacancies/po...

If you have a few minutes spare in your busy schedule today, it's well worth taking time to read this article from @lewisgoodall.com.

Professor Uauy appointed as Director of the John Innes Centre | John Innes Centre Following an international search, Professor Cristóbal Uauy has been appointed as the next Director of the John Innes Centre. Professor Uauy is internationally recognised for his significant…

PRESS RELEASE - Professor Uauy appointed as Director of the John Innes Centre

Following an international search, we are delighted to announce that Professor @cristobaluauy.bsky.social has been appointed as the next Director of the John Innes Centre.

www.jic.ac.uk/press-releas...

@ukri.org

Utterly bonkers. I’m stating the very obvious, but it’s remarkable (yet also depressingly predictable) how quickly the proponents of “free speech” start banning everything they don’t like.

We have an exciting full-time permanent position available for a proteomics specialist for the Proteomics platform at @johninnescentre.bsky.social The platform has excellent facilities and provides essential experimental expertise research at the institute.
jobs.jic.ac.uk/Details.asp?...

Anish Kumar - BBCR1 Essential Mix [02.11.24] Tracklist 01 Anish Kumar - ID1 [unreleased] 02 DWIG - Luise und die Strandpiraten [Giegling] 03 Anish Kumar - ID2 [unreleased] 04 The Blessed Madonna - Exodus [Stripped & Chewed] 05 K-Lone - Cinco [Sw

#NowListening some banging tunes on.soundcloud.com/ZbMUDa61xrHo...

Trying to find an experiment we could actually do this evening and spotted “make your own telephone”. Was looking promising until I realised we were all out of bladders 😂

Harmless Scientific Experiments for Boys (the introduction does at least acknowledge that girls can also use the book) including such “harmless” experiments as making gas from coal, and a DIY thermometer involving your own glass blowing and “a very small quantity of mercury” 🤔

Well the award for most cowardly, boot-lickingest academic society has squarely gone to the American Society of Microbiology, who has taken down features of various non-white scientists. Absolutely pathetic behavior. Those articles are now coming up as “under review”. Truly sickening cowardice here.

Is anyone having issues with NCBI at the moment? Really difficult to reliably retrieve sequence data using Entrez. Unsure if this is an impact of the absurd presidential decisions about the NIH, or just routine maintenance?

This is how Bruce Wayne became a millionaire

A necrotizing toxin enables Pseudomonas syringae infection across evolutionarily divergent plants Grenz et al. interrogate the Pseudomonas syringae species complex for its capacity to infect evolutionarily divergent host plants. Their results demonstrate that broad host isolates from phylogroup 2 rely on the lipopeptide toxin syringomycin to promote host necrosis and enhance bacterial growth in plants.

Very happy to share the final version of our work on the evolution of broad host virulence in Pseudomonas out now @cellhostmicrobe It’s just in time for the holidays 🎄🦠 www.cell.com/cell-host-mi...

Congratulations! Excellent work!

Returning to the UK after a great trip to beautiful Gent. Alway a pleasure to hear about the natural products research happening there 😊 Also got to dress up in a gown for the first time in years! Now to the JIC Mol Micro Xmas lunch to “recover” after last night’s Belgian beers 😂

Bring back Erasmus+ and youth mobility in Europe Taking Britain out of the Erasmus+ programme was a huge mistake. Labour must rejoin and accept the EU’s offer of a youth mobility scheme

Taking Britain out of the Erasmus+ programme was a huge mistake. Labour must rejoin and accept the EU’s offer of a youth mobility scheme

MIBiG 4.0: advancing biosynthetic gene cluster curation through global collaboration Abstract. Specialized or secondary metabolites are small molecules of biological origin, often showing potent biological activities with applications in ag

Are you working on natural products? We’ve just released version 4.0 of the MIBiG data standard and repository! It now includes 3059 biosynthetic gene clusters, thanks to the combined efforts of 288 expert contributors. A thread: (1/8) academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...