If you're at #cellbio2025, @atmolines.bsky.social Hernan Garcia and I invite you to attend our Minisymposium “Physical Cell Biology from Molecules to Organisms” for incredible talks on epigenetic mechanical memory, viscoelasticity, cortical flows, morphogenesis, tissue wetting, size scaling, et al!

🚨 Link up with me at #Cellbio2025 ! 🚨 Excited to present the majority of my postdoc work in the Physical Cell Biology from Molecules to Organisms Minisymposium. Thanks to the organizers for putting together such an exciting session 🤩

Super excited to share some of my work in such a great session at #cellbio2025!! If you’re at the meeting come on down, I’ll be talking about cell density and its influence on tissue fluidization during epithelial morphogenesis 🔬👨🏻‍🔬🪰

Looking forward to seeing everyone at #cellbio2025! Excited to share new work from my postdoc to measure, model, and control the interplay of tissue fluidity and multicellular patterning in a living organism. Come see me at my talk or poster (details below), or DM me if you want to meet up!

As always, huge thanks to Gene-Wei Li with whom it was fantastic to do this work, & of course @hannes-stark.bsky.social, Felix Faltings, Regina Barzilay, and Tommi Jaakkola for the collaboration.
@MITBiology @hhmi.org (5/n)

Almost all of these de novo anti-gyrase peptides were so strongly toxic that they bacteria expressing them were totally eliminated from the population – similar to the inhibitory fragments we previously discovered! We're excited about these peptides as novel antimicrobials. (4/n)

We tested ~1800 designs experimentally in living cells alongside fragments tiling across DNA gyrase. About 20% inhibited bacterial growth, and 5.5% were specific to the designed binding mode, which we assayed by almost 1800 mutants breaking the peptide binding interfaces! (3/n)

High-throughput discovery of inhibitory protein fragments with AlphaFold | PNAS Peptides can bind to specific sites on larger proteins and thereby function as inhibitors and regulatory elements. Peptide fragments of larger prot...

We previously showed protein fragments are generalizable inhibitors of protein interactions (www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...).
Here, show that target sites discovered by protein fragment scanning can be attacked by alternative modalities – in particular de novo peptide binders! (2/n)

Thrilled to contribute to this exciting work on protein binder design together w/ @hannes-stark.bsky.social
, Felix Faltings, Regina Barzilay, Tommi Jaakkola, and co. We applied BoltzGen to design novel antimicrobial peptides targeting DNA gyrase based on inhibitory protein fragments. (1/n)

Happy to share that this work is now published in @biophysj.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1016/j.bp...

So honored to be speaking today at the Stanford.Berkeley.UCSF Next Generation Faculty Symposium! Hope to see you there! (Zoom registration link below)

Friendly reminder that the deadline to submit an abstract for talk at #cellbio2025 is TOMORROW, Wednesday, September 3, 2025 at 9 PM ET! Please consider submitting to our minisymposia "Physical Cell Biology from Molecules to Organisms (more details in the repost)

Check out this exciting new minisymposium at ASCB!

Congratulations to Barbara Imperiali, the Class of 1922 Professor of Chemistry and Biology, who has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences.

chemistry.mit.edu/chemistry-ne...

The @berlowlab.bsky.social kicking off the next session at #PS39

If you missed his talk, Jake Simmons and Jamie Do of the Berlow lab will both be presenting posters at the afternoon session!

Local collective memory from ratiometric signaling outperforms cellular gradient sensing limits YouTube video by Debraj Shubham Ghose

We found that cells use emergent collective memory—arising from simple chemical reactions—to outperform physical limits of detecting chemical gradients. Curious how? 1/n

8 min talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7XH...

bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#biophysics #cellbiology

Excited to be at the @bostonbacteria.bsky.social‬ Meeting this year!
I'll be a panelist at the AI in biology breakout session on Tuesday 6/10 after lunch, in Hall A -- together with ‪@microyunha.bsky.social‬ and M.S. Suryateja Jammalamadaka.
Come join us for what should be a great discussion!

Whitehead Institute Member Yukiko Yamashita, who studies how genetic information is passed from parents to offspring, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Full story on our website: wi.mit.edu/news/yukiko-...

So excited to see this live! Awesome work from
@giannatbusch.bsky.social on the concept of population-based synergy—using cell-to-cell heterogeneity to uncover new therapeutic vulnerabilities!

Zero-shot design of drug-binding proteins via neural selection-expansion Computational design of molecular recognition remains challenging despite advances in deep learning. The design of proteins that bind to small molecules has been particularly difficult because it requ...

Super excited to share a new preprint from our lab on design of small-molecule binding proteins using neural networks! The paper has a bit of everything. A new graph neural network, new design algorithms, and experimental validation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
🧵🧪

I'm the biggest fan of Rikki. Elegant physics. Breathtaking biology.

If you're looking for a seminar speaker...she's a fantastic communicator.

Congrats for the new work, @rikkigarner.bsky.social!

Check out this extremely thought-provoking work on tissue fluidity, cell motility, and patterning from @rikkigarner.bsky.social! Certainly changes how I think about development...

Also happy to share the @MITBiology news brief highlighting our @NIH-funded basic research which paves the way to systematically develop novel inhibitors and drugs, such as peptide-based antibiotics: biology.mit.edu/a-sum-of-the....

This was a wonderful collaboration with @bassafras.bsky.social, Amy Keating, and Gene-Wei Li at @MITBiology.

Happy to announce that our paper on systematically discovering peptides to inhibit protein-protein interactions in living cells is out now @pnas.org: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/....

@MITBiology @hhmi.bsky.social

See thread on the updated preprint for details: x.com/bioSavinov/s...

Maximum intensity projections for silicate in-expressing cells scattering light captured by a custom-built microscope capable of illuminating the bacteria at incident angles ranging from −90˚ to 90˚.

Researchers engineered Escherichia coli bacteria to express an enzyme derived from sea sponges, which polymerizes bioglass from silica, allowing the bacteria to self-assemble lenses that focus light into narrow, intense beams. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Now updated!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

⚠️ Tag with Caution ⚠️

New preprint led by Kerstin Dörner in Maria Hondele’s lab with contributions from Fan Cao on our side on the effects of tagging with FPs and peptides on condensation and phase separation 🧪

TL/DR: It’s complicated

See more:
doi.org/10.1101/2024...