Thanks Anirban! Hope all is well in Milan!
Posts by Helen Foster
Thank you Kelly!
A big thank you to everyone for their support and encouragement, especially @carter-lab.bsky.social and @gaiapigino.bsky.social for their mentorship, and @takashiochi.bsky.social for nominating me!!
I am delighted to be among this years winners awards from the Biochemical Society! The Early Career Award recognises the work I did during my PhD and postdoc, and hopefully signals a bright start for my new lab within the @astbury-bsl.bsky.social at the University of Leeds 💫
Congrats to the @biochemsoc.bsky.social 2027 Award winners, including @helenfoster.bsky.social who has won an Early Career Research Award.
Helen was a PhD student in Andrew Carter’s group in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, and is now a Group Leader at the University of Leeds.
#LMBalumni
Grazie Seba!! 😊
Huge thank you to all the co-authors for their contributions - @samlacey.bsky.social, Noor Verwei, @margotriggi.bsky.social, Jose Davila-Velderrain, @gaiapigino.bsky.social - and the fantastic support from @humantechnopole.bsky.social ✌️
Overall, the multi-step assembly process ensures coordinated emergence of structural integrity and motility. Functional modularity appears to be in-built, meaning assembly can easily be modulated to generate the diverse cilia-based structures we see across life.
There was so much to unpack with this data, we teamed up with the marvellous @margotriggi.bsky.social to help explain what we think is going on. (Please also check out our model of central apparatus assembly here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...)
By imaging the tips of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii motile cilia by #cryo-ET, we captured the intermediate steps in axoneme assembly and uncovered a host of unexpected structures along the way.
Very happy to say that our work on how axonemes are generated is now available on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... - if you’ve ever wondered how the incredibly beautiful, complex structures within motile #cilia are constructed then this is for you!
Many congratulations to Girish R Mali (@dyneinassembly.bsky.social) and team, awarded the 2025 Ian & Barbara Gibbons Award for their work on the regulation of axonemal dynein motors that power ciliary beating!
The award recognises groundbreaking advances in the Dynein field every four years.
Time to get signed up for the Symposium on Structural Proteomics! This time at @humantechnopole.bsky.social in Milan 6th-8th October Full speaker lineup announced. Thanks to @thermofishersci.bsky.social @brukercorporation.bsky.social, Affipro and MSVision for support
Info
ssp2025.squarespace.com
New preprint out 🔥🔥 on my postdoc work with @manuelthery.bsky.social and @lblanchoin.bsky.social about how we can create sustained dynamic steady states of actin network inside microscopic wells that contract "forever" without collapsing! A thread 🧵
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Interested in learning to process cryo-ET data in the latest version of Warp? I'll be running a workshop on April 22nd in central London, UK
details+registration: forms.gle/FLDr3ZWtVGXs...
Hope to see you there!
JOB ALERT!!! The National Facility for Structural Biology at @humantechnopole.bsky.social is HIRING!! BlueSky-less Andrea Graziadei is looking for a technician to join his Unit and push #structuralproteomics to new, uncharted territories!! 1/3
This scheme shows the cargo adaptor FHF in the middle with arrows pointing to distinct microtubule and actin-based motors (dynein-dynactin, KIFC1, KIF1C and myosins V, IX and X as well as Tropomyosin 1). It also shows a link to Rab5 marked early endosomes. The hypothesis is that FHF coordinates multi motor binding at the early stages of endocytosis. The PhD project would address the hierarchy of motor binding and how these motors coordinate to allow the newly formed vesicle to transition from the actin to MT cytoskeletal network.
If you’re interested in how molecular motors coordinate to power intracellular trafficking events (e.g. endocytosis), I’ve got a PhD position available to study this at vibrant Bristol uni. In this project, we will capture highly dynamic events by #cryoEM, single molecule imaging & cell biology. 🔬❄️🧪