Welcome, Tony Hyman!

EMBL welcomes its new Director General, Tony Hyman, as he takes up the mandate of leading EMBL's six sites.

www.embl.org/news/embl-an...

A snapshot from a whole-cell Lattice Microbes simulation of the JCVI-syn3A minimal. Credit: Thornburg et al., Cell (2026)

The Quantitative Cell Biology institute (QCB) at UIUC is hosting a summer school on studying living cells, both computationally and experimentally. Participants choose a theme: whole-cell computational modeling (Martini + Lattice Microbes), MINFLUX, or AFM-IR. Registration is free!

“The glass must be absolutely transparent for one to perceive the mud at the bottom” 💪

doi.org/10.1063/5.03...

The image features a blue background with the AAAS logo at the top. Text reads "Congrats to the 2025 AAAS Fellows" in white. A gold emblem is centered at the bottom.

Join us in congratulating the new 2025 AAAS Fellows class! This distinction is among the highest in the scientific community and honors scientists, engineers, and innovators whose efforts on behalf of science and its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished. https://bit.ly/4svrgaB

Happy to announce that my institution, @irbbarcelona.org, is opening two group leader positions, 1 in chemical biology and 1 in structural biology, to strengthen our expertise in molecular sciences: please spread the word !

Congratulations to Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard on receiving the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award! They are recognized for their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing. awards.acm.org/turing @umontreal

Founders of quantum information win top prize in computer science Turing Award winners Gilles Brassard and Charles Bennett pioneered ideas that are now foundational to quantum computers and quantum communications.

My latest

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Curve Appeal: The Architecture and Engineering of Membrane Bending This webinar, hosted by the Membrane Structure & Function Subgroup of the Biophysical Society, and organized by Adam Smith, will highlight how lipid composition, protein assemblies, and membrane mechanics work together to generate and regulate membrane curvature in cells. Three invited speakers will present on membrane bending in a way that's accessible to undergraduate students interested in biochemistry and biophysics, with sufficiently many fun new things sprinkled in to also be interesting to specialists in the field. Invited speakers are: Itay Budin (UC San Diego) Margaret E. Johnson (Johns Hopkins University) Cecília Leal (University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign). Sign-up link for the webinar: https://my.biophysics.org/Events/Calendar-Of-Events/Meeting-Home-Page?meetingid=95b51c20-8219-f111-8342-7ced8d22117d We hope to have as lively an event as we had a year ago, when we also hosted a biophysics membrane webinar! Log in—it'll be fun! Please share widely!

📣 To celebrate Biophysics Week, the Membrane Structure and Function Subgroup (MSAF) of @biophysicalsoc.bsky.social will host a webinar on March 24 at 11am EDT. Our speakers are @mejohnson81.bsky.social, @ibudin.bsky.social, and Cecília Leal (not on 🦋). 🧪

👀 More info in the alt text! Please share! 🔄

Postdoc position:Computational Biophysics of Disordered Proteins, Lindorff-Larsen group, University of Copenhagen, Denmark https://tinyurl.com/REWIRE-PD Deadline May 3rd, 2026

We are hiring a postdoc in computational biophysics and machine learning studies of intrinsically disordered proteins

We aim to study the function of IDPs by combining CG MD, ML and bioinformatics in collaboration with @tanjamittag.bsky.social & @rhp-lab.bsky.social

tinyurl.com/REWIRE-PD

Excited to share our work is out in
@Nature
! We used TR cryo-EM to visualize the activation of Gi1 and G11 from NTSR1. With MD sims & work from the Blanchard and Lambert Labs, this revealed key differences driving signaling efficiency between G-proteins.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cell Size & Growth Cell Size & Growth is a fortnightly online seminar series showcasing the latest research into cellular size, growth, scaling and biosynthesis.

swafferlab.co.uk/size-and-gro...

Characterizing the Conformational Dynamics of the Ribose Transporter B Protein in Escherichia coli: Enhanced Sampling via Multiple Force Fields We present a molecular dynamics simulation study of the E. coli ribose transporter protein B (RbsB), a conformationally labile protein found in the periplasm of the bacterium. The ribose transporter e...

Our latest paper in which we use multiple force fields to recover various conformations of the ribose transporter from E. coli. The work of DPhil student Nikolai Juraschko and postdoc Florencia Klein Rocha

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Don’t hide the good stuff in the SI

In 2008, we published a paper on parameterizing force fields for unfolded proteins using NMR data, developing an early HPS model for intrinsically disordered proteins. The paper showed the idea, validation with synthetic data, and applications to real proteins.

Figure 1. Cryo-EM of abundant protein complexes in native membranes.

Figure 2. Cryo-EM of membrane proteins in vesicles.

Figure 3. 3D reconstruction of V-ATPase in native synaptic vesicle membranes.

Figure 4. Generation of membrane vesicles for structure determination of proteins in their native lipid bilayer.

I've written a review on what I think is an extremely exciting direction in cryo-EM:

Cryo-EM of endogenous membrane proteins in their native lipid bilayer

Open access in Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics:
doi.org/10.1017/S003...

Agreed!! A very exciting direction in structural biology

Congratulations Sarah and the Team! Very-well deserved🎉

A picture is worth a thousand words or, in this case, billions of calculations.

With help from @ncsaatillinois.bsky.social, Drs. Emad Tajkhorshid, Hale Şiir Hasdemir, and PhD candidates Yupeng Li and Carlos Cuellar revealed how membrane transport proteins in E. coli function.

(Story link in bio)

A photo of Lynmarie Thompson, the current president of the Biophysical Society, presenting plaques to Ilya Levental and Ariane Briegel, the Program Chairs of the 2026 Annual BPS Meeting

Thank you Lynmarie Thompson, @leventallab.bsky.social and
@arianebriegel.bsky.social for your service to the @biophysicalsoc.bsky.social and in organizing the 2026 BPS Meeting!

Sad to miss my first Biophysical Society Meeting in 12 years, but the lab will have strong representation! A thread (1/7)

Attending #bps2026? Check out these exciting events hosted by CPOW:

PI to PI Mixer
Sunday 4-6 PM
Esplanade 159/160

Steps and Suggestions for Getting Your Scientific Paper Published
Monday 2:30-4 PM
Esplanade 155

Looking forward to seeing you all in San Francisco!

@biophysicalsoc.bsky.social

Cutaway and close-up views of a Martini coarse-grained whole-cell model of JCVI-syn3A, showing the densely packed cytoplasm with proteins, RNA, metabolites, and chromosome inside a lipid membrane with embedded membrane proteins

Our paper on [Bentopy](doi.org/10.1002/pro....) is out in Protein Science! We developed Bentopy to make assembling large-scale MD models more accessible, building on what we learned from trying to simulate whole-cell models. Here's our updated Martini JCVI-syn3A cell model👇

Model of mitochondrial compartments. The assembly of the mitochondrial model based on an experimentally informed membrane structure (white), from an empty structure (left) into a mask representation of the IMS (yellow) and matrix (pink) compartments represented by 3 nm voxels. Structures are packed into their assigned compartments based on the mask. In the last section and the magnified inset, structures are colored by kind: Proteins (green), RNA (dark blue), metabolites (pale blue).

Our paper about Bentopy is now published in Protein Science!

Bentopy makes assembling large-scale MD models accessible and fast.

doi.org/10.1002/pro....

@janstevens.bsky.social, @cg-martini.bsky.social

Pleased to share the final version of this behemoth of a paper, now finally published. I guess I can retire now?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

More functional data, many thousands of words removed, and a few other updates from last year's preprint.

Don’t miss this morning’s NITMB Seminar!

@karthikshekhar.bsky.social, the John F. Heil Jr Assistant Professor at @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social, shares insights into bioelectrical dynamics at membrane interfaces

Join the seminar online or in-person at NITMB www.nitmb.org/nitmb-semina...

Sharing a PhD advert on a very cool project on cells interacting with bacteria, which is offered by a colleague from our institute!

A dynamic displacement mechanism drives protein import into mitochondria Most mitochondrial proteins are produced in the cytosol and imported through the translocase of the outer mitochondrial membrane (TOM) to reach their final destination. Although this protein entry gat...

📢 New preprint alert!
How do proteins enter mitochondria? We uncovered a surprising mechanism at the mitochondrial entry gate—using #NMR, in vivo single-particle tracking, yeast experiments, and MD simulations to crack the code.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#StructuralBiology #Mitochondria
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Monday,  19th of January at 11:30,
Manish Kushwaha from Micalis Institute, INRAE, Jouy-en-Josas.

**  Bacteriophages as Communication Signals: Information Processing in Multicellular Bacterial Systems **

This seminar will take place at the seminar room of Gulliver C1.62  at 11:30.

copyright Palina Nepachalovich of ZML Dresden

Ups we did it again! Please mark your calender. EMBO Workshop “Lipid Code to Life”, taking place September 7–11, 2026, in Dresden, organized by Maria Fedorova, @lipid.bsky.social, Valerie O'Donnell, @holthuislab.bsky.social and @molcellbiophys-lab.bsky.social 🥳 Retweets = lipidlove