Astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch in their orange astronaut suits as they sit inside the side of a helicopter after it has landed

LOL, trying to stay offline and do my work, and friends are sending me

"LOOK AT THIS NEW PIC!" texts ....

This one is worth it.

First PoC and first woman to go around another world. Don't stop talking about this point. It's important.

#ArtemisII

If you use GitHub (especially if you pay for it!!) consider doing this *immediately*

Settings -> Privacy -> Disallow GitHub to train their models on your code.

GitHub opted *everyone* into training. No matter if you pay for the service (like I do). WTH

github.com/settings/cop...

ICECREAM: high-fidelity equivariant cryo-electron tomography We present ICECREAM, a self-supervised approach that achieves substantially better denoising and more reliable missing-wedge recovery in cryo-ET, while reducing training and inference time relative to comparable baselines.

Vinith Kishore et al.: ICECREAM: high-fidelity equivariant cryo-electron tomography #CryogenicElectronTomography #SelfSupervisedLearning #MachineLearning @insadelyon...#IUCr https://journals.iucr.org/paper?S2059798326001622

Finally, we used a mild photocrosslinking strategy (pXL-EM) to improve reconstruction quality, inspired by its successful use in recent work from @alessandrovannini.bsky.social at Human Technopole, led by @aleborsellini.bsky.social.

Have a look at his preprint doi.org/10.64898/202...

(6/7🧵)

📢 First preprint from the Casañal Lab!

Excited to share our work on human NSUN2, done together with the brilliant @ecleroy.bsky.social.

Using #CryoEM, we capture the dramatic structural rearrangement of tRNA as it flips a cytidine into the NSUN2 catalytic pocket for m⁵C modification.

Take a look👇

MitoTracker transfers from astrocytes to neurons independently of mitochondria The mitochondrial dye MitoTracker is commonly used to investigate intercellular mitochondrial transfer (IMT), particularly between astrocytes and neurons. Hole et al. compare MitoTracker with a geneti...

⚡️We are excited to share a new paper from the lab by @drkhole.bsky.social in @cp-cellrepmethods.bsky.social - suggesting MitoTracker dyes are not a reliable tool for detecting intercellular mitochondrial transfer❗️ www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Happy to share our new preprint on the mechanism of human tRNA 3' CCA maturation! This project was spearheaded by Bernhard Kuhle in my group, with contributions from many others and a great collaboration with the group of Peter Rehling (UMG). See highlights below!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Kelly Nguyen announced as Laureate in Life Sciences at the 2026 Blavatnik Awards in the UK.

Congratulations to @kellythd-nguyen.bsky.social, Group Leader in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, who has been named the Life Sciences Laureate at the 2026 Blavatnik Awards in the UK 🎉

Read the full news story here: mrclmb.ac.uk/news-events/...

#LMBNews #Blavatnik2026

Scientists have seen Asgard archaea crawling for the first time. When it comes to the origin of eukaryotes, this is like seeing a feathered dinosaur in the wild. (Video courtesy of Philipp Ralder)

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.

Summer internships

Are you a bachelor or master student anywhere in the world, and would like to come to us to work full-time on a supervised research project? Applications for the 2026 MPIA Summer Internship are open now!

IsoNet2 determines cellular structures at submolecular resolution without averaging pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41415472/ #cryoEM

Rewiring protein sequence and structure generative models to enhance protein stability prediction

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Rewiring protein sequence and structure generative models to enhance protein stability prediction [new]
Boost protein stability prediction via language & inverse folding models. Structure informs sequence.

Organelles do NOT have a single uniform pH.
And if you think they must, because “protons diffuse fast,” this paper is for you.
A thread on why that assumption is wrong; and what we found instead. 🧵 1/n

Holy cow the Zhou lab at UCLA is cooking with Isonet 2 - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Averaging-free direct visualization of ribosome translational state! #teamtomo #cryoet

RNA and Proteins: Who Bosses Whom?

Despair seems like a reasonable course of action
'Some estimates are that up to 20% of the entire proteome can bind RNA and moreover that about 20% of all known protein complexes have an RNA component in them and you really have to think about how to deal with such large figures.'

How's your juggling act? Mitochondria also have one, and the MITOtalk this week will be all about it.
See you there?

We are looking for a computational postdoc to work with us on new optimisation algorithms to make #RELION even better. Join our bubbly team at the @mrclmb.bsky.social in Cambridge, UK. 🤗 RTs appreciated.

mrc.tal.net/vx/appcentre...

don’t have an answer for you but if you’re looking at cell tomograms often I can’t recommend Don Fawcett’s big red book The Cell highly enough - it’s a *beautiful* atlas of classic EM images

Initial attempt at replicating in relion (parameters in next post). This is for Aca2-RNA, using a 100k subset of the 2D-classified particles (no prior 3D cleanup).

A 1-class ab initio in relion, then local refinement in relion (1.8deg searches+blush) gives a nominally 3.3Å map; 3.5 Å w/out blush.

This one is a bit of a departure from the usual and definitely a work in progress!

We found that by using ab initio reconstruction at very high res, in very small steps, we could crack some small structures that had eluded us - e.g. 39kDa iPKAc (EMPIAR-10252), below.

Read on for details... 1/x

Congratulations to Dirk Görlich and Steven L. McKnight, 2025 #LaskerAward winners! - “for discoveries that exposed the structures and functions of low-complexity domains within protein sequences” 🧪
@mpi-nat.bsky.social
#Lasker2025 #LaskerLaureate #structuralbiology #phaseseparation

bioRxiv bat signal. We had a huge influx of submissions around Labor Day and now have a backlog. If any affiliates are available to screen, we'd be eternally grateful!

How stupid has science been? | EMBO reports EMBO Press is an editorially independent publishing platform for the development of EMBO scientific publications.

"...if few within science are trained to communicate about their work and those who do are not only not rewarded but disparaged, then it is not as hard to see why the war on science has been prosecuted with little resistance."

www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Postdoc Research Group Schur The Schur lab at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) has an open postdoc position for a highly motivated candidate to be part of our ERC-funded project ActinID. Our Group ...

We're hiring a postdoc!
Join our ActinID project to explore an uncharacterized actin-binding protein.

- Background in cell and/or structural biology?
- Eager to bridge both fields?

Get in touch if you're curious or have questions!
#cellbiology #cryoEM #cryoET #actin

ista.ac.at/en/job/postd...

A cellular entity retaining only its replicative core: Hidden archaeal lineage with an ultra-reduced genome Defining the minimal genetic requirements for cellular life remains a fundamental question in biology. Genomic exploration continually reveals novel microbial lineages, often exhibiting extreme genome...

So cool, a novel archaeon with a super small genome and no metabolic genes!
"An unprecedented level of metabolic dependence on a host, a condition that challenges the functional distinctions between minimal cellular life and viruses."
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Structure of fungal tRNA ligase Trl1 with RNA reveals conserved substrate-binding principles Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Published online: 25 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41594-025-01589-3Köhler et al. present the crystal structure of fungal tRNA ligase Trl1-LIG bound to an activated RNA substrate, providing key insights into conserved substrate binding and activation, enzyme specificity and a tRNA substrate coordination model.

ICYMI: New online: Structure of fungal tRNA ligase Trl1 with RNA reveals conserved substrate-binding principles

Barbara McClintock portrait

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬

Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

SLAC, Stanford researchers discover large protein-free RNA structures Cryogenic electron microscopy showed for the first time that large RNA complexes can assemble without the help of proteins. 

Cryogenic electron microscopy showed for the first time that large RNA complexes can assemble without the help of proteins, expanding our understanding of RNA folding and function.
www6.slac.stanford.e...

spent some time this evening updating the teamtomo.org site - if you're interested in cryo-EM + Python you might want to take a look around!