Drinking an extremely reactive (acidic?) coffee ☕️

Why do intrinsically disordered proteins appear larger than they are in SDS-PAGE? We investigate how sequence properties affect SDS-PAGE mobility using synthetic IDRs.

Conclusion: We need to consider both SDS binding and the compaction of protein-SDS complexes.

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

Thanks! My student was asked about this during her qualification last year (to which we obviously didn't have a great answer).
After some reading, I thought it was because proteins with hydrophobic residues (which IDPs lack) don't get efficiently coated with SDS and appear smaller than normal

Some molecular machines, like ribosomes, can persist for long periods of time in cells.

Could molecular aging of ribosomes shape how proteins are made?

In our new preprint we track ribosomes as they age in cells and uncover unexpected effects on translation (1/10)

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

Come check out the fancy subgroup t-shirt as well!

Look forward to catching up at the Membrane Structure and Function Subgroup on Saturday morning!
#bps2026
We also have several posters and talks coming up in the next few days, check them out!

What's the relation between voltage and calcium in dendrites? Xiang Wu studied this in CA2 hippocampal pyramidal cells in behaving mice. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

looks more expensive than ours 😂

cute!

People in the lab made me this ☺️

Happy new year! I've so enjoyed the end-of-year lists of people's favorite papers from 2025, so I made a list of 16 #lipidtime studies from 2025 that I found interesting. Here they are in no particular order (please add more if you would like!), and here's to much more exciting science in 2026! 🧪

What is the computational role of dendritic excitations? Byung Hun Lee and team mapped voltage dynamics throughout the dendritic trees of CA1 pyramidal neurons in mice navigating in virtual reality. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

If you're at #cellbio2025, @atmolines.bsky.social Hernan Garcia and I invite you to attend our Minisymposium “Physical Cell Biology from Molecules to Organisms” for incredible talks on epigenetic mechanical memory, viscoelasticity, cortical flows, morphogenesis, tissue wetting, size scaling, et al!

Membrane potential s an important regulator of cell number density and growth via Hippo-FAT1 signaling in response to mechanical pressure
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... @cellcellpress.bsky.social @harvardmed.bsky.social

An idea we started in 2019 is now published in @natneuro.nature.com! Excited to share our new study: rdcu.be/eRvdA

Congrats to Mengmeng Jin and our team! Heartfelt thanks to all collaborators for their support, and to the reviewers for their insightful comments!

... and we should be careful when comparing surface objects to 3-dimentional ones. Things can get very confusing!

... I put the dot there, because it fits nicely to a corner of the Central Park!

In other words, fresh water in lakes and rivers corresponds to the volume of more than 1,000,000 billion human!

So, yes, fresh water is a valuable resource - but, might not be as scarce as shown in the first image...

.. But, how does '8 billion people' fit on this image?

It was already shown.
Did you notice it?
If not, let me help you with this red arrow.

It turns out, 8 billion people can 'nicely' pack into a sphere of 1 km diameter.
In this image, it's represented by that tiny red dot in New York City...

... Let me show this on a different map. The map of New Jersey, one of the smallest states in the US.

The entirety of fresh water barely covers NJ, and fresh water in lakes/rivers barely fills a small county.

These are supposed to support the need of ~8 Billion people, isn't that crazy?! ...

... leaving only that tiny blue pixel (representing fresh water in lakes and rivers) readily available to us.

When I first saw this picture in school, I was so impressed. I was convinced that fresh water is an extremely limited resource for humanity. Yet, something always felt counterintuitive...

In the spirit of Halloween, let me share with you a 'scary' piece of statistics.

Many of you may have seen this image, which demonstrates the extreme scarcity of fresh water on Earth.

That small droplet over Atlanta is our ENTIRE storage of fresh water. But, most of those are hard to get...

Happy to share that this work is now published in @biophysj.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1016/j.bp...

Cluster nanoarchitecture and structural diversity of PIEZO1 at rest and during activation in intact cells MINFLUX nanoscopy reveals subcellular distribution and conformational diversity of PIEZO1 channels in intact cells.

Cluster nanoarchitecture and structural diversity of PIEZO1 at rest and during activation in intact cells | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

😂

Apparently, these are the main (research) topics we are known for within my university :)

Fun fact: if you google "Rutgers tension", we are among the top hits - only behind the 2023 Rutgers University strike...

I never truly appreciated the name Invitrogen until I came across a company called 'Invivogen'.

Mechanical Regulation And Activity of Nuclear Condensates The cell nucleus is constantly subjected to forces under many fundamental biological processes, including confined cell migration, osmoregulation, and large-scale stresses across tissues during develo...

Mechanical Regulation And Activity of Nuclear Condensates: Biophysical Journal www.cell.com/biophysj/ful...

Congratulations to the “Real Chemist”👨‍🔬

🚀The #BiomembraneDays2025 concluded

WE THANK ALL PARTICIPANTS & OUR SPONSORS🙏🙏🙏

@abberior.rocks
Critical Insights in Biophysics
Ernst Rudolf Schloeßmann Foundation
@dfg.de
@jcellsci.bsky.social
@lipotype.bsky.social
@naniontech.bsky.social
@picoquant.bsky.social
Refeyn Ltd
@biologists.bsky.social

That’s great, thanks Helge!