Three cool scientists introduce their work "Our new theory has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, but we feel its depths and intricacies are best appreciated on the limited-edition vinyl release."
My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com
Excited to be at the @bscb-official.bsky.social Dynamic Cell conference this week! Happy to chat about publishing in @jcellsci.bsky.social or to tell you more about the charitable activities of @biologists.bsky.social.
#notforprofit
#cellbiology
Thanks! This is indeed the wonderful paper I mentioned.
Worth checking out the associated resource:
topology.bioch.ox.ac.uk
What if you got to work with some of your best friends on a science project? I can't publish how fun this was, but I can show you the data (🧵)! Last week, we posted our second neutrophil swarming paper to bioRxiv and I wanted to post my favorite videos here~
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Tuesday is finally our next big session on all things #cilia, #centrosomes & gloriously kick-ass #CellBiology. Free, open to all aficionados, and frankly no excuse not to join. 👀 Unregistered? Easily fixed 👇
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bscb-genso...
This essay affected me deeply.
“Emotional depletion becomes nor-malized. Fatigue becomes proof of commitment. Delayed gratification becomes professional identity.
There is nobility in that commit-ment, but endurance has a quiet cost….And steady depletion follows us home.”
Update!
1) I found an estimate from 2010 (doi.org/10.1002/pmic...) which is close to mine,
2) a similar calc (www.proteinatlas.org/humanproteom...),
3) someone emailed with their wonderful unpublished paper which has a very accurate answer (again similar but much more rigorous). Watch this space!
Thanks. I hadn't seen this paper. It's great that they were trying to predict this before the data was available. Seems like they thought membrane proteins were 15-20% of the proteome, which is an underestimate, but not too far away.
Obituary of Annette Dolphin @annieneuro.bsky.social written by her sister in The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/science/2026...
Pet Sounds. Can’t believe you had to ask!
We are looking for a human MALAT1 overexpression plasmid.
Does any of you kind people have it?
ICYMI: a quick calculation of transmembrane domain-containing proteins in a proteome.
If you need to use this info: the code is in the post, or you can cite it since all quantixed posts have their own DOI courtesy of Rogue Scholar. doi.org/10.59350/0ah...
I should probably bump my post from yesterday given that I managed to post while this "decentralised" website was having a moment.
With all the cuts to research funding in European countries, everyone is turning to the ERC...
The ERC should be a source of supplementary funding, not a substitute.
Every country in Europe must invest in basic research and increase its budgets!!!!
Depends on the definition of distinct. This is the Uniprot proteome, which I think is one canonical form for each gene/protein. So any splicing or other shenanigans are not accounted for. Wikipedia says 400 OR genes and total GPCRs as 750 in human.
Chonkiest is 38 TMDs!! only 2 examples so hard to see on the plot!
About one quarter of the 20659 proteins in the human proteome have TMDs. Most have 1 TMD, there's about 1000 with 7 TMDs. Details are in the post, which is linked.
How many proteins in the human proteome have transmembrane domains? And of those, how many examples with n TMDs are there?
Couldn't find an answer, so I calculated it from Uniprot data with some #RStats magic (and I did some model organisms while I was at it). 🧪
quantixed.org/2026/04/16/m...
The UK rejoining Erasmus is the best science news for a while! #AcademicSky
www.gov.uk/government/n...
I have to use Outlook for a work email account. Copilot needs manually switching off daily. Worse than malware.
Come on Microslop, I’m on a Mac. Can’t you just mess with the Windows users? You're years late porting features to Office apps on Mac but you managed to enforce this one on us quickly.
A graphic from the post which shows different pacing strategies for trying to run a sub-3 marathon. Most of the folks that succeed use an ahead-of-pace strategy.
A follow up post using #RStats to answer the question of how to optimally pace a (sub 3 h) marathon.
Note: sub-3 is a daydream to me, but other people doing it (or not) was help to get an answer.
#Running #DataViz
quantixed.org/2026/04/14/m...
Looks painful. Glad it wasn't any worse.
The ImageJ status bar was a little bit sad, as it didn't have its own game. Fixed by this 1D javascript space invaders !
See forum.image.sc/t/an-imagej-...
How important do you feel discovery research and ‘basic’ science is for understanding disease? Well, I have a little bit of a biased view on the topic, since I'm a basic scientist myself. The lab has made more and more discoveries with very strong therapeutic implications, and often people ask me why we are not pursuing these further ourselves. Part of it is that I think about this very much as an ecosystem. People have different skills – I have colleagues who are very good at the application side of things and I have other colleagues, including people in my lab, who are very good at the basic science. There are a lot of very smart people at every stage in the ecosystem and, sometimes, we have to acknowledge that we can't all be experts in every step. A lot of basic science discoveries will end up having profound implications in the clinic – if you don't have the full imagination about how to get it there, that's okay, because you're still a very important piece of the jigsaw puzzle and other people can help. If the basic science discoveries didn't exist, then it's quite possible that the well would run dry. We cannot simply rely on the idea that the therapies currently in clinical trials are going to be enough because we already know that – for diseases, such as cancer, and with rapidly evolving viruses – there needs to be a constant influx of new ideas to stay ahead of the arms race. I'd also make a plug for the fact that, ultimately, we are all interested in human disease, but disease research in humans is not ethical or possible. This is why creating and studying model organisms in a high-throughput, low-investment context is incredibly important. We cannot just say ‘okay, we're going to stop work on anything that is not related to human research’, because – actually – it's all relevant to humans.
Do you think basic science is particularly threatened by cuts to funding? Science itself is quite uncertain. We do experiments wondering if they will even work. It's discovery, and you don't know where it's going to lead. It could lead to a billion-dollar company, something like mRNA vaccines or CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, or it could simply be something that interests you. Sometimes it might appear esoteric from the outside, but there are very smart people dedicated to this work. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that most of this work is paid for by taxpayers, but funding uncertainty creates a very unstable foundation. If the foundations are weak, people are going to get much more conservative about the science that they're doing and worry that ‘blue-skies research’ is not worth pursuing because it won't get funded. And that would be a mistake because all innovation in science really originates from blue-skies, basic research. The second thing that uncertainty does is send a message to our young trainees – who are our future – that this is not a career option that will provide professional and personal stability. I worry that this kind of uncertainty will mean we lose an entire generation of people, and that would be a loss we might not be able to overcome.
I was interviewed by @katiepickup.bsky.social recently for @dmmjournal.bsky.social. This has a little bit of my background, a little bit on science and mentoring, and a little bit (ok, more than a little bit) on funding in science.
Check it out at: journals.biologists.com/dmm/article/...
The conference “Mitotic spindle: From living and synthetic systems to theory” is open! www.phy.pmf.unizg.hr/~mitosis/
Follow us #SpindleCroatia2026!
Just discovered ggmagnify hughjonesd.github.io/ggmagnify/re.... love it! But quite probable that I will overuse slightly creating figures for my next talk. You have been warned.
Happy #fluorescencefriday (and start of vacation!) to all those who are celebrating
Lifeact-labeled epidermal stem cells closing a wound after in vivo adult zebrafish skin injury
ICYMI: How have publication lag times in cell bio journals changed over the last 20 years? 🧪
Very upsetting to hear the sad news of Greg Hannon’s passing. I always enjoyed our far too few conversations we had over the years. He had an interesting and insightful perspective on any science being discussed. He will be missed. www.cruk.cam.ac.uk/news/in-memo...
oh yes. They've earned it.
Wow that's impressive. We have a few papers where the author list expanded during revisions, but not on that scale.
