Great to meet Prof. Jian Zhou @zhou-jian.bsky.social at CSH Asia!

Came to Suzhou to attend CSH Asia AI and Biology

We were delighted to host the UTokyo-NTU Symposium 2026 and welcome the NTU professors to IQB! Thank all participants for their attendance and engagement!

Lab group photo for 2026. With two interns joining in February and five students joining in April, our lab has grown into quite a large group! 🙂

【拡散希望】私も運営に携わらせてもらっているEMBO–MBSJ Laboratory Leadership Forumが6月27日に東京で開催されます！ラボ運営に必要なスキルについて学べる貴重な機会だと思いますので、みなさん是非ご参加ください！

Doing science requires us to speak 2 different languages: (1) Day science language is a highly precise language for designing & executing experiments; while (2) Night science language uses analogies & anthropomorphizes to give us intuitions about the unknowns we explore.
(Night Science recap, Day 4)

We have been invited to the symposium at National Taiwan University every year, but this year the IQB will host it and welcome professors from NTU. We are preparing to make it a great event, which will be held next week!
ut-ntu-2026.iqb.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Recently AI-driven automation has been especially celebrated, but I have come to feel even greater pride in reading papers, reviewing them carefully, and writing and submitting my comments in my own words.

Thanks Ibrahim for stimulating talk and discussion!!

Home – Cell Symposia: Decoding Cellular Complexity: Single Cell Biology in the Era of AI Cell Symposia: Decoding Cellular Complexity: Single Cell Biology in the Era of AI

Join us at Cell Symposia: Single-Cell Biology in the Era of AI (Dec 2–4, 2026, Munich) 🇩🇪

From multi-omics to AI-driven models of cellular dynamics — an exciting lineup across experimental & computational biology.

Hope to see you there!
🔗 www.cell-symposia.com/single-cell-...

To celebrate my return from Germany, I served Glühwein in the lab🍷 The three wine mugs I bought at the Christmas market came in handy!

Yes, I made it back to Japan safely! I've jumped back into a busy routine. I’m happy we’ll be able to host you in Tokyo in December! Let’s catch up a lot then!

🧪🧬New preprint We present cryo-EM structures of reconstituted CTCF–nucleosome complexes, showing CTCF dimerization drives nucleosome oligomerization into defined higher-order assemblies. Disrupting CTCF–CTCF interfaces in mESCs reduces looping and impairs differentiation. tinyurl.com/CTCF-nucleos...

After staying for two months in Munich, I returned to Japan. I met many excellent professors and students, had great discussions, and gained invaluable experience that would be difficult to obtain in a short visit. I want to thank Markus @itisalist.bsky.social for hosting me!

We are thrilled that our study on the evolution of gene regulation in mammalian cerebellum development – led by @ioansarr.bsky.social, @marisepp.bsky.social and @tyamadat.bsky.social, in collaboration with @steinaerts.bsky.social – is now out in @ScienceMagazine! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

AlphaGenome is out in @nature.com today along with model weights! 🧬

📄 Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

💻 Weights: github.com/google-deepm...

Getting here wasn’t a straight path. We discussed the story behind the model, paper & API in the following roundtable: youtu.be/V8lhUqKqzUc

Yesterday was my last day with the Markus lab members. They surprised me with a gift to thank me for my two months. I’m moved and very happy.
In my two months, I've received so much from them in many ways. I’m glad I had the chance to visit.

I finished my invited talk at the TUM Life Science Seminar. I’m relieved it went well, and I’m grateful that so many people came to listen. I was also happy to see Wilhelm, a former special student from the Nakato lab, in the audience!

Thank you for the honor of inviting me to give a seminar, Markus!

New lecture series: TUM Life Science Talks foster interdisciplinary discourse New lecture series: TUM Life Science Talks in Freising-Weihenstephan promote exchange with renowned scientists.

On Wednesday, @rnakato.bsky.social gave an excellent talk in our new @tum.de Life Science Talks series: www.ls.tum.de/en/ls/public.... It was nice to see so many people join to hear about the role of multi-omics data in elucidating gene-regulatory mechanisms. Well done @rnakato.bsky.social

Our research exchange seminar between the Nakato and Markus labs has finally taken place! It was a great opportunity to share our work and to learn from many excellent presentations by their students. We are grateful to them for making a full-day seminar possible despite their very busy schedules.

A network-based model of Aspergillus fumigatus elucidates regulators of development and defensive natural products of an opportunistic pathogen Abstract. Aspergillus fumigatus is a notorious pathogenic fungus responsible for various harmful, sometimes lethal, diseases known as aspergilloses. Unders

Very happy to see this published: doi.org/10.1093/nar/...: a GRN-based approach to predict regulatory subnetworks for developmental and pathogenic processes in Aspergillus fumigatus and GRAsp: a network viz tool: grasp.wid.wisc.edu with @jeanmichelane.bsky.social and Nancy Keller labs!

Happy to welcome our lab members to @tum.de for a research exchange with Markus’s lab @daisybio.de. Looking forward to the research presentations on the 15th!

TUM Life Science Talks: Prof. Ryuichiro Nakato (University of Tokyo) TUM Life Science Talks start with Prof. Ryuichiro Nakato: “Can multi-omics analysis elucidate genome regulatory mechanisms?”

I’m honored to give a seminar at the TUM School of Life Sciences in January. I’ll be presenting our work on multi-omics analysis. I look forward to the discussion!
www.ls.tum.de/en/ls/public...

My hotel room is a bit too dark to work in, so I came to the TUM library today. I'm glad that visitors like me are allowed in. I also found the famous "Parabola Slide"!😀

Evening in Freising

Join us for the AI & Biology conference in beautiful Suzhou, China, Apr 20–23, 2026! A place to spark dialogue about the future of AI × biology.
We invite abstract submissions from all intersecting fields (deadline Feb 13).
Please help spread the word!
www.csh-asia.org?content/3008

My first month at TUM has been wonderful. I arrived with high expectations, and I have already learned much more than I anticipated. I'm looking forward to spending another month doing research here. Thank you, Markus @itisalist.bsky.social @daisybio.de for hosting me!

Reverse gyrase and 3D genome architecture suppress hyperthermophile genome instability arising from horizontal gene transfer Reverse gyrase (Rgy), a distinctive topoisomerase conserved in all hyperthermophiles, has the unique ability to introduce positive DNA supercoils. It has long been hypothesized that Rgy overwinds geno...

Delighted to share our latest preprint on reverse gyrase, a unique topoisomerase found exclusively in thermophiles!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Programmatic design and editing of cis-regulatory elements The development of modern genome editing and DNA synthesis has enabled researchers to edit DNA sequences with high precision but has left unsolved the problem of designing these edits. We introduce Le...

After a huge amount of work w/ @alex-stark.bsky.social's group, a new version of our Ledidi preprint is now out!

In an era of AI-designed proteins, the next leap will be controlling when, where, and how much of these proteins are expressed in living cells.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...