Announcement for a three-year Rising Talent Fellowship for Black heritage postdoctoral scientists at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

The LMB Rising Talent Fellowship is open for new applicants!

Aimed at Black heritage scientists, the Fellowship offers a 3-year postdoctoral position beginning Oct-Dec 2026.

Visit our website for more info: mrclmb.ac.uk/careers-and-...

Please circulate this post to anyone who might be interested!

Three-year funded postdoctoral fellowship for scientists returning after a 12-month career break, deadline May 17, 2026.

The LMB is proud to launch the Career Returner Fellowship, a three-year, fully funded postdoc placement for scientists who have had a career break of over 1 year.

Applications are open now!

More details: mrclmb.ac.uk/careers-and-...

Please share this post with anyone who may be interested!

Many congratulations, Helen! Very well deserved. 🥳

That's not bad. But Claude might have seen the entire set of instructions during its training... I think the expected outcome is around 2.9A. Where does it get if you ask to optimise for that number? Humans are known to (often unknowlingly) "cheat" to get there. What will AI do?

I would try Blush regularisation on this.

The structure of alpha-synuclein filaments from the homozygous M83 mouse is different from any disease-specific alpha-synuclein filaments. If anything, it resembles filaments from MSA more than filaments from PD.

Our results suggest that pathogenic mutations in alpha-synuclein lead to a disruption of the interaction with the molecules responsible for density island A, which may then lead to protofilament dimerisation and twist reversal. Dimeric, left-handed filaments may then accelerate disease.

Interestingly, H50Q filaments are identical to those of idiopathic #Parkinsons, in agreement with previous reports that this mutation is not pathogenic. This individual likely suffered from idiopathic PD, in line with an unclear family history.

A53T and G51D form doublets of the Lewy fold with a left-handed twist, and without density island A, which sets them apart from alpha-synuclein filaments from idiopathic #Parkinsons, which are right-handed Lewy fold singlets with island A.

We determined #cryoEM structures of alpha-synuclein filaments from individuals with mutations A53T, G51D and H50Q, as well as those of the homozygous M83 mouse, which is transgenic for human A53T alpha-synuclein.

Dimerisation and twist reversal of the Lewy fold in alpha-synuclein mutants with Parkinson's disease and dementia.

Together with Yang Yang (now at @vai.org) and Michel Goedert. 🥳

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

And we also have this targeted fellowship opening again soon. Do you identify as black? Then this opportunity is for you!

Did you take a career break of at least one year, perhaps to start a family, take care of a loved one, or for any other reason? Come and join the @mrclmb.ac.uk through this targeted fellowship, and discover the many more ways in which this is such a special place to work. 🤗

Because the mouse and human tau sequences are identical in the ordered cores of the tau filaments, there is no "species barrier". Our results suggest that the mouse may be a good model system to study the molecular mechanisms of tau pathology spreading through the brain.

By #cryoEM, we show that the structures of the seeded filaments, which are made of mouse tau, are identical to those of the human seeds. This is the first direct demonstration of the prion-like behaviour of an amyloid protein.

However, a central pillar of the prion hypothesis, that strains retain their structural identity upon transmission, had not been demonstrated. We injected WT mice with human seeds from brains with 2 tauopathies: AD or CBD. The mice developed tau lesions characteristic of the human diseases.

Most neurodegenerative diseases are believed to spread through the brain by prion-like mechanisms. #CryoEM structures of #amyloid filaments suggest that distinct amyloid folds provide the physical basis for prion strains, by which a given protein can cause several distinct diseases.

Our latest @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social: "Prion-like transmission of human tau strains in the mouse brain" 🥳

With Michel Goedert and Masato Hasegawa.

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

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

Proud to share the yeast telomerase structure, led by the talented @hongmiaohu.bsky.social in collaboration with the Wellinger and Chartrand labs. Discovered 37 years ago and took us nearly 7 years but totally worth the wait 😍.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFE4...

🤯

Cycling Linked to Lower Risk of Dementia, Study of Half a Million Finds Getting from A to B on a bicycle more often could reduce risk of dementia, possibly by protecting a part of the brain tied to memory functions, new research finds.

“Compared with non-active travelers, the cyclists had a 19% lower risk of all-cause dementia, a 22% lower risk of Alzheimer's, a 40% lower risk of young-onset dementia (before the age of 65), and a 17% lower risk of late-onset dementia.”

Getting around a bike more often could reduce dementia risk.

#TeamTomo if you want to use CTF-corrected 3D subtomos from AreTomo3 in RELION v.5.1 you can use this updated script:

github.com/Phaips/aretomo3torelion5

👇

AreTomo2 reconstruction and real 3D subtomogram extraction and refinement/classification.

GitHub - 3dem/relion: Image-processing software for cryo-electron microscopy Image-processing software for cryo-electron microscopy - 3dem/relion

You can download RELION-5.1 from github.com/3dem/relion (branch ver5.1)

Note that the beautiful startup image of dynein:dynactin on a microtubule was provided by Sami Chabaan from the @carter-lab.bsky.social. 🤗

We're excited to announce the beta-release of #RELION-5.1! 🥳 This release has important updates on our #amyloid processing pipeline, as described in this preprint: doi.org/10.64898/202... There are also some tweaks for #teamtomo.

#OpenSoftwareAcceleratesScience

#OpenSoftwareAcceleratesScience! 😍

Is the template matching done at low resolution? Otherwise you run the risk of model bias leading to false high-resolution maps, a la Einstein-from-noise.

This forces the program to do local angular searches only. It may be interesting to know where those particles end up if given the freedom to move around in exhaustive searches.