😳🤯

Grateful to Elisa for her early belief in the project, and to the RNA Biology Laboratory and NCI Center for Cancer Research for the support. Also, many thanks to Minju Ha for editing our work and the reviewers for pointing out where we could indeed strengthen some of our conclusions.

Huge congratulations and thanks to co-first authors Eric Simko and Sowndarya Muthukumar, who carried this heroic reconstitution effort across two continents, and to Tanner Myers, PhD, and Anna Valkov for essential contributions

▪️ Human DCP1 does not stably interact with, or directly stimulate, DCP2. Activation goes through the enhancer PNRC2.
▪️ EDC4 forms tetramers through an extended coiled-coil, and both DCP1 and EDC4 assemble further into higher-order oligomers, suggesting a model for how EDC4 tetramers recruit DCP2.

A few of our favorite surprises:
▪️ The C-terminal region of human DCP2 is NOT autoinhibitory, breaking cleanly with the yeast paradigm.
▪️ The RNA-binding residues of yeast Dcp2 are not conserved in human DCP2. Instead, a charged C-terminal region takes on substrate recognition.

This journey began years ago in the lab of the late Elisa Izaurralde at Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen.

Turns out, human decapping plays by different rules.

For years, our picture of the mRNA decapping machinery has been shaped by beautiful work in yeast. But does the yeast blueprint actually describe the human system? We set out to answer that by reconstituting the full human decapping network from scratch with recombinant full-length proteins.

Our latest paper is out today in Nature Communications: "Conserved and divergent features of human mRNA decapping revealed by biochemical reconstitution." #RNAsky #RNAbiology
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dr Tom Deegan from University of Edinburgh awarded The Colworth Medal by The Biochemical Society 2027 Awards.

Congratulations to Tom Deegan who receives the Colworth Medal in 2027! Pioneering work from the Deegan Lab has redefined our understanding of eukaryotic DNA replication and provided conceptual and technical frameworks that continue to drive new discoveries across molecular biology.

The Biochemical Society 2027 Centenary Award presented to Professor Matthew Freeman from University of Oxford, UK.

A leader in the cell biology of signalling, the 2027 Centenary Award is presented to Matthew Freeman in recognition of his pioneering discoveries into the biological significance and mechanisms of rhomboid intramembrane proteases and pseudoprotease and unwavering commitment to mentorship!

Anthropic are missing out on a great ad here

The cartwheel was first visualized ~70 years ago in the symbiont Trichonympha in the wood termite gut. We’ve discovered the cartwheel’s secret: a unique zigzag stacking of SAS-6 tetramers that facilitates the iconic 9-fold symmetry of cilia.

#cellbiology #teamtomo #SAS6 #cartwheel

One can imagine the impact on the ECRs involved in this work

Dorsal view of a transgenic adult zebrafish. You can see the branched lymphatic system (in orange) within the brain (left) as well as scales on the body of the animal (in blue). Credit to Daniel Castranova at Weinstein Lab.

A trio of #Postdoc job openings in the #WeinsteinLab at NIH 🐟🔬

Epigenetics of development: zfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/...

Vascular-associated tissues & organs: zfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/...

Angiogenesis & Lymphangiogenesis: zfin.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/...

h/t @zfinmod.bsky.social 🧪

Since last year, I've been making a RELION GUI that supports viewing, navigating and running jobs in a way completely compatible with the original RELION pipeline. Now it's working nicely for both SPA and tomography! Please try it out - github.com/hanjinliu/hi...

The variety of German bees before the Industrial Revolution (187, top) vs after the introduction of pesticides (43, bottom), DHM

Gooey chocolate meringue stack with pistachios for Easter lunch per @nigella.bsky.social

Every PI

Side-by-side ribbon diagram in coot.

Coot 1.2 released

With side-by-side stereo

and Agentic Coot

pemsley.github.io/coot/blog/20...

pemsley.github.io/coot/blog/20...

APEX-seq maps transcriptome-wide subcellular RNA localization in living cells Nature Protocols - This Protocol describes the transcriptome-wide labeling of RNAs in a particular subcellular compartment using proximity biotinylation by localized APEX2 enzyme and subsequent...

Excited to share our @natprot.nature.com paper on using RNA proximity labeling to map subcellular RNA transcriptomes. We’ve been working in this area for a while and wanted to create a resource paper to guide the uninitiated reader. rdcu.be/fblvI

Anna Karenina

I did not see accuracy validation, only benchmarks on one high-end GPU, and it requires bgzip to get the full efficiency advantage. Most software produce either uncompressed or gzip-compressed FASTQ. bgzip is standard for BAM/CRAM/VCF. Would be good to see this fleshed out a bit more.

To differentiate old-school bots from AI ones?

😕

resolving proteins on polyacrylamide gels by electrophoresis in SDS? 250k-500k citations?

AlphaFold protein interaction modeling tutorial and workshop - the Node This video is the culmination of several years attempting to: (1) Figure out best practices for modeling protein-protein interactions; (2) Understand the This video is the culmination of several years...

AlphaFold protein interaction modeling tutorial and workshop thenode.biologists.com/https-www-yo...

I have a set of 5M designed proteins against one target. What is the best way computationally to identify clusters and assess the diversity of target epitopes on this scale? I wrote a little script that performs contact-set Jaccard-similarity clustering but I wonder if Foldeseek is a better solution

PDB 7jsn colored by DAQ scores of fit in cryoEM map.

The ChimeraX DAQplugin computes DAQ scores showing the agreement between atomic models and cryoEM maps. Available from ChimeraX menu Tools / More Tools. cxtoolshed.rbvi.ucsf.edu/apps/chimera...

How to discovery new regulators of cell migration using a high-throughout assay?

Make use of our new label-free deep learning-based automated tracking assay DeepBIT.

To appear in Science Advances.

Read about DeepBIT here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Last but not least, NIH is an equal opportunity employer, and candidates will be evaluated on their skills, experience, and potential, with these factors interpreted in the context of their training environment.