Academia in a nutshell

Simon Hammann@simonhammann.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Big congratulations to Aleksandra Panfilova who defended her PhD last week! Aleks has been teasing apart models of protein interactions and consequences of mutations on these, preprint coming soon! She’s now looking for new opportunities in Estonia, so reach out to hear if you’re hiring 😊

Annika raises many good points about the challenges with (not) “just putting the slides online”

Annika Barber@annikabarber.bsky.social · 7mo ago

If students want to use my lecture slides as a framework for taking notes, it aids their learning. If they are using them as a "contract" about what I will put on the exam, it doesn't. I would rather they listen intently and take their own notes - studies show they will learn and retain more! 4/n

So looking forward to this meeting!

Lara Muffley@muffley.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Also! We'd love your help in promoting this event in the #Australia #Australasia region! Topics and programming will be of interest to the #FunctionalGenomics #Genomics #Clinical #Research #Community ℹ️https://www.mss2026.org

Junior professor position at the University of Kaiserslautern! Our Department of Biology is seeking a colleague working with microalgae. This is a wonderful place to do wonderful science with great people! Please, repost :) Further details: jobs.rptu.de/jobposting/1...

T’is the season When I scrape ice Off my saddle

🧵 Thread👇 Heute Nachmittag im Fokus: Wissenschaftliche Karrierewege An der Uni wird oft nur das Karriereziel Professur diskutiert, aber der Weg dahin ist schwer, wenig planbar und die anderen Berufsoptionen sehr vielfältig (und zumeist sogar besser).

spongebob is writing on a piece of paper with a pen .

ALT: spongebob is writing on a piece of paper with a pen .

media.tenor.com

I lament all the research and writing I never got to do because I was too busy fighting sex pests and institutionalized misogyny

Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽@needhibhalla.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Sexual harassment is a productivity tax on women in STEM

Adding citations of people who might review the paper

One of my science heroes, Joan Brugge, talks about how science funding cuts are slowing their work on breast cancer prevention--share this widely www.facebook.com/60minutes/vi...

439K views · 15K reactions | Harvard researcher Joan Brugge says her work has the potential to prevent breast cancer, but she was notified last spring that her federal funding was terminated. “It was ...

Harvard researcher Joan Brugge says her work has the potential to prevent breast cancer, but she was notified last spring that her federal funding was terminated. “It was just like a gut punch. My...

facebook.com

Fall is beautiful, even on gray days 🍂 🍁

Thinking only of Rosalind Franklin today, and what was stolen from her (and so many other female scientists alongside her).

Rosalind Franklin and the damage of gender harassment

Spurred by a recent report on sexual harassment in academia, our columnist revisits a historical case and reflects on what has changed—and what hasn’t

science.org

My 11yo is more active in her Teams chats than I am in mine.

Danish design cup

Looks like OpenFold3 has been formally released in a public "preview". Not quite on parity with AlphaFold3 on a few benchmarks shown, in particular for antibody interactions. All info on the github link. I am sure we will hear more about this from the developers github.com/aqlaboratory...

GitHub - aqlaboratory/openfold-3: OpenFold3: A fully open source biomolecular structure prediction model based on AlphaFold3

OpenFold3: A fully open source biomolecular structure prediction model based on AlphaFold3 - aqlaboratory/openfold-3

github.com

The UNC Department of Biology is seeking a Director of Biology Teaching Labs, a key leadership role overseeing our undergraduate laboratory program. 1/n Learn more and apply here: unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/308...

I have a very bad feeling about this...

Alternatively, lads, might be worth thinking about supporting the German car industry to remain viable in the future rather than locking them into a dying business model. But sure, you go off...

Katja Diehl@katjadiehl.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Ich schäme mich so. "In einem Beschlusspapier der Ministerpräsidentenkonferenz in Mainz heißt es, das starre Verbot der Verbrennertechnologie ab dem Jahr 2035 gefährde die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit des Automobilstandortes Deutschland." www.deutschlandfunk.de/ministerprae...

Airplane sunrise is the reward for early departures. Looking forward to European RosettaCon 2025!

Kiel

Ah, a classic moment of @nature.com recognizing the scientific contributions of both genders: man and machine.

Prof Anna Watts@profannawatts.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Lol the Nobels can't even acknowledge women's contribution to discovery. But sure let's acknowledge The Machines.

You can get MSAs directly from AlphaFold DB now (alphafold.ebi.ac.uk). I also missed the FoldSeek implementation, which lets you search for structurally similar proteins direktly. This saves some clicking around. Neat!

Maxim Tsenkov@mitsenkov.bsky.social · 10mo ago

The latest #AlphaFold DB update is out! We synchronised with UniProt release 2025_03, predicted protein isoforms across all species, and provide MSAs used to generate each prediction. Proud of the team at the PDBe for the hard work that went into this. Grateful to play my part in it!

As I tell my students, if you arrived at a simple answer in biology you have done one of two things: arrived at the wrong answer or asked the wrong question

Claus Wilke@clauswilke.com · 10mo ago

Biology is much more complicated than most non-biologists can imagine. And AI is not going to change this anytime soon. blog.genesmindsmachines.com/p/we-still-c...

Kindergarten teacher asks what I teach (biological sequence analyses), I try to explain. She turns to the 3yo and asks „What do you want to be when you grow up?“ Prompt and confident answer: „A butterfly 🦋!“

The proteasome-substrate-shuttle protein UBQLN2 contains—like other quality control system proteins—a long region devoid of lysine (a lysine desert) Martin Grønbæk-Thygesen (from @rhp-lab.bsky.social) et al show that introducing K here causes ubiquitylation and degradation doi.org/10.1101/2025...

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · 10mo ago

The importance of UBQLN2 ubiquitylation for its turnover and localization https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.02.679934v1

For every Nobel that goes to a criminally under-recognized woman scientist (Brunkow, Karikó), or fails to go (Candy Lee), a week of mourning and reform for an academic system wherein you can do Nobel-prize-worthy-work and still end up without a conceivable path to being a professor.

Nature@nature.com · 10mo ago

BREAKING: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded jointly to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance" Stay tuned for more. #NobelPrize

Fun & action the local science museum #experimentarium

This October I’m drawing one molecule a day inspired by proteins in pdb @rcsbpdb.bsky.social Day 2/31 Prompt WEAVE N-terminal domain of a Fibrion - a building block of silk fiber produced by silkworms. Pdb: 3UA0 Next prompt is CROWN and I would love your suggestions!

Some interesting thoughts on the Perspective Harper Raiken and I wrote over the summer

Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · 10mo ago

We can identify genetic associations with disease, but the hard part is figuring out what effects the variants at those loci actually do, including how penetrant they are. This is hard. But one phrase in this piece struck me in particular... /1 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I don’t know who wrote this, but it’s absolutely perfect