The more challenging targets CASP gets, the more the structural biology community will learn!

So, OpenAI, whose entire business model relies on some overhyped dudebros using vast amounts of stolen data and stolen labour, is releasing a specialised GPT for the life sciences. And naming it, apparently without any sense of irony or self-awareness. Rosalind.

Dear colleagues, With deep sadness I share the news that Andreas Engel passed away last Wednesday, at the age of 82, after a courageous fight against an aggressive caner. Only half a year ago, he was out hiking in the Italian mountains with his wife Barbara, walking 160 km in a single week. Andreas trained as a physicist in Bern, Switzerland, before heading to John Hopkins University in Baltimore for his postdoctoral work. He then led a research group at the Biozentrum in Basel, and in 1985 took on the role of a group leader in research and development at Ilford Ltd. in Fribourg, Switzerland. In 1987, he joined forces with his colleague Ueli Aebi to establish the Maurice E. Müller Institute at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. Together, Ueli and Andreas served as professors for structural biology there for almost a quarter century, leaving a lasting mark on the field of structural biology as we know it today. Andreas Engel was a true pioneer. He was among the first to apply atomic force microscopy (AFM) with the tip operating under water, and one of the earliest researchers to perform 3D reconstructions using scanning transmission electron microscopy, achieving remarkable high-resolution maps of porin 2D crystals by STEM. He became a leading expert in membrane protein 2D crystallization, and his group played a key role in the determination of the first aquaporin structure, in collaboration with Peter Agre and Yoshinori Fujiyoshi. As he approached retirement from Basel, Andreas founded the Center for Cellular Imaging and NanoAnalytics (C-CINA) of the University of Basel, which in 2009 operated among others one of the very early Titan Krios instruments. From 2008 also held a professorship at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, followed by a position at TU Delft in the Netherlands in 2013. In 2020, he was among the founding members of CryoWrite, a company in Basel that he led as CEO until recently. His contributions to science, to the tools of str…

Photo of Andreas Engel

Sad news on the passing of Prof. Andreas Engel, a pioneer in the field of cryo-EM (shared with the 3DEM community by Henning Stahlberg).
Andreas' kindness, warmth, and enthusiasm for science and his colleagues will be missed.

We're a big step closer to automated determination of protein structures. The key? Having AlphaFold listen to experimental data. Great work, led by @alisiafadini.bsky.social and @minhuanli.bsky.social in an inspiring collaboration with @moalquraishi.bsky.social and @randyjread.bsky.social.

ROCKET came out on Nature Methods today. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to translate a research concept into a practical tool—one that researchers can seamlessly drop into their existing pipelines. We learned a lot along the path and will carry that spirit forward.

Exciting to see the final form of this great work out in print!

Our heavily updated final version of ROCKET for experiment-guided structure modeling is out in @naturemethods!

New frontiers like high-throughput fragment screening and mid-res tomography are forcing a rethink of how experiments are modeled. ROCKET+OpenFold proposes a solution👇

Very happy to have had a chance to attack an initially very low-resolution #cryo-EM map with #ROCKET! Thank you again @alisiafadini.bsky.social and all other co-authors of this important work, which truly shows the power of combining experimental structural biology and #AI inference.

rdcu.be/fa9YH

ROCKET enables model building of a ZPD filament from low-resolution cryo-EM

Starting from an #AlphaFold-Multimer prediction, we used #ROCKET to build a model of ZPD, a homopolymeric zona pellucida (#ZP) protein, into an initial #cryo-EM map at only ~9 Å resolution. A subsequently obtained 4.6 Å map highlighted how superior the ROCKET model was over the initial prediction:

It was a fantastic trip and a pleasure talking with the Pfizer team 😄 One highlight was discovering they’ve built a web GUI for ROCKET to make it more accessible—I’m thrilled (and even a bit surprised) to see how our tool helping people solve real-world problems.

New OpenFold3 preview out! (OF3p2)

It closes the gap to AlphaFold3 for most modalities.

Most critically, we're releasing everything, including training sets & configs, making OF3p2 the only current AF3-based model that is functionally trainable & reproducible from scratch🧵1/9

After an Amtrak coding session with @minhuanli.bsky.social, ROCKET team is back at @rs-station.bsky.social HQ! Thank you to Pfizer for welcoming us in Groton and to everyone who attended our seminar online. Exciting work ahead to continue exploring frontiers in structure determination. Back to it 🚀

Take a look at our March issue: journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202...

On the cover: the response of two paradigmatic metalloproteins of different types, one iron-containing and one copper-containing, to X-ray-induced metal reduction at cryo- and room temperature journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202...

The @thecimr.bsky.social and MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit are celebrating "Rare Research Day" TODAY!

By creating factsheets on how their work contributes to greater understanding and potential treatments.

#RareDiseaseDay #ShareYourColours #RareDiseaseDay2026 #UniversityofCambridge

I find Airlie’s composite self rotation representation much easier to interpret. Check it out!

At a time when the UK should be capitalising on its global reputation as a great place to do science, this is an enormous own goal. I am so sorry for all those who jobs are going to be impacted.

Finally comms from UKRI - on a Sunday evening. No mention of the hundreds of ECRs who will see their careers ended by these decisions and notably no explanation for MRC retrospectively applying cuts and wasting all the work that went into writing, reviewing and scoring applications - £millions

Missed it, thanks for pointing it out!

My hero!!! An amazing scientist and a wonderful person!

Has the MRC research funding ‘pause’ been covered by any major news network?

It feels like it should be a major news story

We have a fantastic opportunity for a PhD studentship in collaboration with @jesuscollegecam.bsky.social and Cambridge Children’s Research Institute, part of the new Cambridge Children’s Hospital. Closing date 20th Feb; all the details here: www.cimr.cam.ac.uk/postgraduate...

She continues to be a lively presence at structural biology meetings. And for my money has the deepest, most intuitive understanding of protein geometry. A treasure.

As someone who works directly with her in Phenix, I can tell you she is still one of the most focused and dedicated people I know!

By the way, this is by the @alisiafadini.bsky.social behind ROCKET!

GitHub - rs-station/meteor: bringing you the best difference maps bringing you the best difference maps. Contribute to rs-station/meteor development by creating an account on GitHub.

New Title Alert: meteor- a tool for computing crystallographic difference maps that specializes in robust identification of weak signals from minor populations such as bound ligands or time-resolved experimental changes.

Learn more here: buff.ly/bgJYF9N

#SBGrid #SBGridSoftware #StructuralBiology

Mapping proteins, one side chain at a time Roland Dunbrack Jr. will receive the ASBMB DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences at the ASBMB Annual Meeting, March 7–10, just outside of Washington, D.C.

This appeared today: www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/...

Now available: the Proceedings of the 2024 @ccpem.bsky.social em Spring Symposium, including a review of the first ten years of the Symposium: journals.iucr.org/special_issues/2025/CCPEM2024/

View all of the Proceedings at journals.iucr.org/d/services/ccpem

Hope to see you there!

Logos for IUCr2026 and Phenix

#IUCr2026 Pre-Congress Workshop: Structure Solution with Phenix
Offers lectures and tutorials on using Phenix for automated macromolecular structure determination and validation from xtal and cryoEM data, integrating predicted models like AlphaFold
event.fourwaves.com/...

There are a lot of ways to say in words how confident you are about something happening, so it’s good to see how consistent you are with yourself and others! (Turns out I’m not very consistent in how I rank near-synonyms.)