mRNA vaccines continue to show major promise.
In a small Phase 1 trial led by Dr. Balachandran, some patients with pancreatic cancer (one of the deadliest cancers) reached 6-year survival.
This is why sustained investment in science & research matters.
tinyurl.com/f4n4anhk
Video 1: Brain doi.org/10.15151/ESR...
Image 2: Heart doi.org/10.15151/ESR...
Image 3: Eyeball doi.org/10.15151/ESR...
Image 4: Lung doi.org/10.15151/ESR...
Image 5: Kidney doi.org/10.15151/ESR...
Image 6: Placenta doi.org/10.15151/ESR...
Image 7: Colon doi.org/10.15151/ESR...
Genomic indicators of gene function: A systematic assessment of the human genome www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...
☕ @joshifrenster.bsky.social @amartinezarias.bsky.social & co utilize mosaic mouse #gastruloids as a model of cell fitness & competition, identifying a temporal window between primed pluripotency and early gastrulation during which #CellCompetition occurs in mammalian #embryogenesis.
bit.ly/4cBmfGK
*Quite a few isoforms, and heavily processed post transciptionally
I am so excited to share our new findings with you! We provide the structural evidence for a direct protein-to-DNA information pathway, showing how a bacterial enzyme 'reads' its own structure to 'write' DNA. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Thank u so much
We are looking for a human MALAT1 overexpression plasmid.
Does any of you kind people have it?
Check this!
I concur
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!!!!
Our department page has had a glow-up.
New look, same obsession with heart and vascular science and RNA biology
Sharper, cleaner, and much more clickable: vrc-frankfurt.de
Web design credits: Manoj Kurian
@goetheuni.bsky.social @cpi-exstra.bsky.social @scale-cluster-ffm.bsky.social @dzhk.de
It is great to see that there are places where the quality of science is credited
Not just that, top Chinese universities provide long-term resources and support for non-chinese faculty, in addition to providing a safe, welcoming and supportive environment
Congrats to China
We're thrilled to announce our 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows. Huge congratulations to these 223 exceptional individuals in the Creative Arts, Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and a range of interdisciplinary fields. You can find out more at www.gf.org. 🎉
☕ @mathilda95.bsky.social @nadlerlab.bsky.social & co introduce a correlative light and electron #microscopy workflow, Lipid-CLEM, combining near-native #lipid probes and on-section labelling via click chemistry. Lipid-CLEM quantitatively analyses lipids in membrane nanodomains.
bit.ly/4moYLJH
📰Our editor Zhe Wang will be attending the AACR Annual Meeting in San Diego. Please feel free to reach out to him (zhe.wang@nature.com) if you would like to meet in person to discuss your work and ask questions about Nature Cell Biology.
Congratulations to the @dev-journal.bsky.social 2025 Outstanding Paper nominations, & special mention to the winner by Yang et al doi.org/10.1242/dev....
For the top three nominations and an interview with the winners see:
journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...
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/...
It took a good two years to rebuild and wouldn't have been able to where we are without the incredible work by current members, especially @jakub-zeman.bsky.social and Hang Ha
You folks inspire me every day
can't wait to share their work in the coming years
Here is our lab page in the department (webpage credit: Manoj Kuriyan)
vrc-frankfurt.de/research/sys...
It's our 12-year anniversary.
Grateful to work with a great group of young scientists in those years.
very proud of what we have done, and very thankful for sticking with our lab values in very tough times
indebted to @erc.europa.eu @cpi-exstra.bsky.social @goetheuni.bsky.social
current lab
The victory of the opposition in Hungary yesterday, like the Polish election in 2023, is a victory for democracy, not just in Europe but around the world.
Since our preprint on the ETC-ATP synthase supercomplex has attracted attention, I would like to introduce the platform we used, Langtaosha. It was launched by SMART together with several other institutions with support from Open Life Science Alliance, aiming for long-term open infrastructure 1/4
1/10
Did you know that molecular phenotypes of human skeletal muscles are vastly different? Meet FANTOMUS, the skeletal muscles promoterome-proteome atlas:
doi.org/10.64898/202...
made with
@andreybuyan.bsky.social @nikitagryzunov.bsky.social @alforrest.bsky.social @sevamakeev.bsky.social
