The trunk of an immature ash trees showing signs of necrosis. Credit WTML.

‼️Researchers at @johninnescentre.bsky.social have developed a fast-track method of breeding disease-resistant ash, reducing germination time from up to 6 years in nature to a week in a lab! Long way to go but this looks really promising. 🤞 buff.ly/AyjgcRV #AshDieback #TreeResearch

Excited to announce Physics of Living Matter 19! To be held in Cambridge 24-25th September 2026:

www.plm-symposium.org

Synthetic chromosomes for 3D functional genomics: from principles to AI-guided design The role of genome 3D organization for fundamental chromatin processes, such as long-range promoter-activator regulatory interactions, remains ambiguo…

Happy to share our review of the past, recent, and future applications of synthetic genomics in studying the 3D functional organization of chromosomes, a set of approaches that are gaining momentum!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I wrote an essay. It’s about gain-of-function mutations. And penguins. Also ion channels, chihuahuas, the film Alien, recycled cardboard, and the Apollonian mind. Oh, and muffins.
Thanks to the editors of #GENETICS @genetics-gsa.bsky.social for letting me take some stylistic liberties. 1/2

Nice highlight of both Laub's lab and our work !
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Still so much to discover in the amazing world of bacteria immunity 🧬🦠🛡️

100+ year old Pasteur Institute in Tehran was a premier infectious disease research institute and vaccine manufacturer

It is a reason Iranian kids like me born in 60s had access to measles vaccines soon after they were developed in the west

Motherhood derails women’s academic careers — these data reveal how and why Mothers in academia take on considerably more childcare-related responsibilities than do fathers.

Depressing: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

That’s All, for Now We're pausing Asimov Press.

substack.com/home/post/p-... I will miss the Asimov pieces !

open.substack.com/pub/denovo/p...

Reversible DNA condensation drives natural transformation

@natcomms.nature.com from Keith Mickolajczyk, Matthew Neiditch, and David Dubnau

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

MGE-UK-4 We are thrilled to invite you to the fourth edition of the MGE UK Workshop, hosted this year in the historic City of York. Mobile Genetic Elements (MGEs) are the ultimate architects of biology. MGEs i...

It is a pleasure to announce the 4th UK MGE workshop will be in York on 23rd-24th June 2026! Registration is free and we are actively looking for contributors. Interested? If so, please register via the website and select the talk option

www.ukmgeworkshop.org

We look forward to seeing you in York!

Congrats!

Training a force field for proteins and small molecules from scratch Force fields for molecular dynamics are usually developed manually, limiting their transferability and making systematic exploration of functional forms challenging. We developed a graph neural networ...

Check out our pre-print, where we train a protein and small molecule force field from scratch with a graph neural network.

We show comparable performance to existing, manually-tuned force fields on a range of tasks including binding free energy prediction. (1/4)

arxiv.org/abs/2603.16770

Germ factories or immune boot camps? Infection and immunity in childcare settings | Clinical Microbiology Reviews SUMMARYChildcare outside the home is a common experience for many children in high-income countries. It is associated with an increase in the incidence of infectious diseases—not just for the child bu...

Have you ever wondered why children starting nursery/daycare pick up so many germs? I certainly did, and with a crack team of parent-scientists/clinicians, we set out to answer that question. Is childcare a germ factory or an immune bootcamp? journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

So you are using IQ-TREE to estimate a tree for "deep time" phylogenetics using amino acid alignments. There is a lot of confusion about how to test model fit. Here are some suggestions.

📢 We’re launching Proteina-Complexa — and after the Jensen keynote mention, we definitely had to post this thread now ;)
Atomistic binder design with generative pretraining + test-time compute, plus large-scale wet-lab validation.
Project page: research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/...
🧵 1/n

AlphaFold database has entered the era of complexes. Together with NVIDIA, DeepMind and EBI, we use ColabFold, OpenFold and MMseqs2-GPU to predict ~31 million complexes (homo & hetro-dimers) resulting in 1.8 million high-quality predictions
📄 research.nvidia.com/labs/dbr/ass...
🌐 alphafold.ebi.ac.uk

You asked, we listened. Millions of AI-predicted protein complex structures are now available in the #AlphaFold Database.

This spans homodimers from 20 of the most studied species, including humans, as well as the World Health Organization’s priority pathogens list.

www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/t...

An image of the Padrãos does Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries) sculpture in front of purple and orange lit clouds during sunset. The portion of the sculpture shown is primarily white colored and shows three men dressed in clothes from the late 15th century with the man in the front holding a model of a sailing ship. The text on the image says, “European RosettaCon, Lisbon, Portugal, Crossing Boundaries with Protein Design, Registrations are open, Early bird until 31st of May, 28th to 30th of October, 2026, NOVA University Lisbon, Campolide Campus, Rectory.” It has the Rosetta Commons logo at the bottom of the image in the middle.

European RosettaCon invites researchers in protein design, biomolecular dynamics, advanced microscopy, and structural determination methods to “cross boundaries in protein design” together. Join us to reach beyond traditional frontiers and into interdisciplinary approaches. europeanrosettacon.org

Deep coverage and extended sequence reads obtained with a single archaeal protease expedite de novo protein sequencing by mass spectrometry Highly efficient hyperthermal acidic proteases combined with hybrid-fragmentation schemes provide five times more unique peptide reads than trypsin or chymotrypsin, greatly boosting confidence in de n...

Deep coverage and extended sequence reads obtained with a single archaeal protease expedite de novo protein sequencing by mass spectrometry: Cell Systems www.cell.com/cell-systems...

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Archaea How a discovery in the 1970s changed the theory of the origin of complex life on earth.

Available now on BBC radio "In our time: Archaea" with Christa Schleper, Thorsten Allers and Buzz Baum discussing the evolution of complex cells with Misha Glenny.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

AF2BIND: predicting small-molecule binding sites using the pair representation of AlphaFold2 - Nature Methods AF2BIND is a logistic regression model trained on AlphaFold2 pair features to predict small-molecule binding-site residues in proteins, without multiple sequence alignments, homology models or knowled...

#Ligand-binding site predictor 😎
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Archaea How a discovery in the 1970s changed the theory of the origin of complex life on earth.

Archaea hit prime time: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

AF2BIND: predicting small-molecule binding sites using the pair representation of AlphaFold2 Nature Methods - AF2BIND is a logistic regression model trained on AlphaFold2 pair features to predict small-molecule binding-site residues in proteins, without multiple sequence alignments,...

Our paper with @sokrypton.org using AlphaFold2 to predict small-molecule binding sites in proteins is now out in Nature Methods! 🧵
rdcu.be/e7SnX
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Quick reminder to join us at @danafarber.bsky.social tonight for an awesome talk by Jody Mou!

Fun: directed evolution of a fluorescent protein within its thermophilic host to improve fluorescence. A great example of how proteins can (be) evolve(d) to better fit their host internal biochemical environment

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Amazing work by Kris and gang! For the first time we have been able to image division ring components live in Sulfolobus. And guess what - CdvA is asymmetrically inherited.

Genomic perplexity and the evolution of context-dependent function Abstract. The fundamental principle that selection acts on a gene's function often assumes implicitly that this function is fixed and intrinsic. However, e

I'm thankful to MBE for publishing this paper. I wan't sure anybody would. The handling editor (I now know was Jeff Townsend) was great, as were the 2 reviewers. It is not an outcome/product/discovery, it is my way of thinking about HGT & pangenomes 1/3 academic.oup.com/mbe/article/...

Flyer for symposium: https://ctrlepiedit.sciencesconf.org/

Very excited to announce the FIRST symposium on epigenome editing! These tools are becoming widely used in mol bio, ag & therapy. It's time to bring leaders together to discuss this rapidly growing and exciting field. And why not in Paris! Please register & share! (1/2) ctrlepiedit.sciencesconf.org

New article- we developed a strategy to fortify salads with Vitamin B12 in indoor farms. Sorry, no chronobiology in this one! A wonderful collaboration between @johninnescentre.bsky.social @quadraminstitute.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social and LettUs Grow www.nature.com/articles/s42...