Very happy to see our work highlighted by @natcellbio.nature.com. A great team effort and a fascinating example of how a simple physical principle can connect mitosis across eukaryotes! @lgudlin.bsky.social, @krunovuk.bsky.social, @kopslab.bsky.social

Nature Cell Biology@natcellbio.nature.com · last wk.

☕ @lgudlin.bsky.social, @krunovuk.bsky.social, Novak et al propose spindle scaling in response to chromosome crowding consistent across eukaryotes; metaphase plate width scales with genome size following a power law with an exponent of ~1/3. @ivatolic.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Invited Speaker Dr. Olivia Carmo will be giving a talk on “Unfurling Mechanisms of Desiccation Tolerance: An Ultrastructural Perspective” at the 2nd virtual WALII Symposium. Register to hear the talk & submit an abstract to present: walii.science/2nd-virtual-...

Our description of fire amoeba, 𝘐𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘦𝘣𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘴, is now online at Cell! Thanks @oliverio.bsky.social and amazing team for questioning the limits of eukaryotes! 🔥 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

A geothermal amoeba sets a new upper temperature limit for eukaryotes

The amoeba Incendiamoeba cascadensis demonstrates that eukaryotic life can withstand temperatures beyond what was thought possible and sheds light on molecular strategies for survival in extreme heat.

cell.com

🎉 I'm thrilled to announce that the Ðonlić Lab has officially opened this month in the BMB department @wusm-bmb.bsky.social at @washumedicine.bsky.social! The lab will study how condensates shape RNA interactions, therapeutic activity, and disease progression. And - we're hiring! 👇

Đonlić Lab

Decoding cellular biochemistry from microscopy: chemical tools, RNA biophysics, and machine learning in condensates.

donliclab.com

Ten years ago Tami, Roy, and I released a movie we made of antibiotic resistance evolving in real time. I thought maybe a couple thousand people tops would see it. I couldn't have imagined it would be seen millions of times, and be taught from middle school through the graduate level worldwide

Our lab is recruiting! If you are interested in learning about retinal ganglion cell resilience and regeneration please see the Research Assistant I position listing below. We are looking for a candidate with experience in either mouse research or stem cell culture. jobs.bcm.edu/job/Research...

Meet the speakers of the 2nd Annual WALII Symposium: Exploring Life Without Water, happening Thursday, Nov 12! 💧 To Learn More and Register for the Symposium: walii.science/2nd-virtual-...

Our collaborative paper, with Daria Bonazzi and @dumenillab.bsky.social is finally out in Nat Comms! Using microfluidic confiners, amazing Laure Leblanc found that confined growth of E. coli uncouples growth and division, as well as pressure and biomass production. tinyurl.com/4zdwrp39

New #RibackLab preprint! The nucleolus's biophysical properties aren't fixed—they're tuned to energy availability. Under nutrient limitation, nucleoli hibernate: stronger interactions, slower rRNA transport, rapid reversal upon refeeding. Led by incredible postdoc @evdokiiap.bsky.social 🧵👇

Evdokiia Potolitsyna@evdokiiap.bsky.social · 2mo ago

1/ Do cells use phase separation to adapt biosynthetic output to changing demands? In our new preprint, we show that under nutrient limitation, the nucleolus enters a reversible ‘hibernation’ state that slows ribosome biogenesis. See doi.org/10.64898/202...

First preprint from the lab spearheaded by our first grad student @sovannytaylor.bsky.social! We discovered "lipoprotein hitchhiking" as a novel cell penetrance mechanism of killer peptides that has convergently arisen across 600 million years of animal and in human disease. 1/n

Sovanny ‘Sophie’ Taylor@sovannytaylor.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I'm so excited to share our preprint! We asked a deceptively simple question: how do cationic cell-penetrating peptides (+CPPs) - found in immunity, venoms, and disease actually enter cells? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Save the Date! The 2nd Annual WALII Symposium is happening on November 12, 2026! Join us to hear from these four outstanding invited speakers! More details coming soon! #WALIISymposium #Science #LifeWithoutWater #DesiccationTolerance

Out now in #PRXLife “Roadmap for Condensates in Cell Biology” journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst... From our amazing discussions at #KITP last summer!

What does an ovary actually look like as it ages—one oocyte at a time? We mapped >85,000 oocytes in >100 intact mouse ovaries, in 3D, across the reproductive lifespan. And the ovary turned out to be much more organized than we expected. 🧵 1/5 www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Three-dimensional mapping of intact ovaries reveals the aging dynamics of the ovarian reserve - Nature Aging

The spatiotemporal dynamics of the depletion of the ovarian reserve remain incompletely understood. Combining whole-ovary imaging, AI and modeling, the authors mapped over 85,000 mouse oocytes and fou...

nature.com

Exciting new preprint from Ignacio Vega Vásquez, Sauer lab, my team and collaborators: #Mega-ExM. From just ~20 NPCs imaged with a 10× objective on a confocal, we reconstructed the 3D structure at ~33 Å. A step toward optical structural biology in intact cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Mark your calendars!! We are excited to announce the date for this year's WALII Virtual Symposium on November 12, 2026! More details will be shared soon!

Lipids build the membranes of all cells, but identifying their precise functions is extremely challenging. Here’s our attempt to change that: How to find and understand lipid-protein interactions, by Katelyn Cook & company. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Got the news today that I've been promoted to Full Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at The University of Chicago. A tremendous honor, one made possible by an incredible group of trainees who I've had the pleasure of working with over the past twenty years. Best is yet to come! 🤓🔬

Huge congrats to the many authors who over MANY years worked on this (but especially @karaehunt.bsky.social , @trevorbrandt.bsky.social, Karina, @shaharsu.bsky.social and @remenecker.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Rational design of disordered proteins for sequence–function investigation - Nature

GOOSE enables the design and testing of thousands of disordered protein region sequences to reveal distinct sequence-to-function relationships.

nature.com

Alex Holehouse@alexholehouse.bsky.social · 8mo ago

New (well, very old, but 100% updated) preprint: Rational design of disordered proteins for systematic sequence-to-function investigation Work done in collaboration with @shaharsu.bsky.social lab - check out the three (3) threads from the folks who did the work!

Jim Shorter and his postdoc Miriam wrote a beautiful preview about our most recent paper on mRNAs preventing misfolding of IDR-containing proteins. UTR-ly unexpected: RNA chaperones tame intrinsically disordered proteins: Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

UTR-ly unexpected: RNA chaperones tame intrinsically disordered proteins

How do cells ensure that complex, multidomain proteins fold correctly? Luo et al. reveal a self-contained solution. The 3′UTR of an mRNA co-translationally chaperones the protein it encodes, preventin...

cell.com

Such beautiful work. Just worth it for the discussion section alone, which is thought-provoking, forward-looking and Linnaeus-quoting.

Ben Long@botbml.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Mature plant chloroplasts form reversible gyroid cubic membranes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Our evil ORFeome paper is out! In collaboration with @alex-stark.bsky.social, we screened ~4,000 viral proteins and secreted effectors from bacteria and parasites, covering hundreds of diverse pathogens, for phenotypes in human cells.

@zjmaggiexu.bsky.social's story on suctorian trap structure adaptation is now online in @currentbiology.bsky.social , with new evolutionary analyses and modeling! This fall, Maggie will keep exploring predatory protists as a PD in @nbellono.bsky.social group; keep an eye out for her she's amazing!

Scott Coyle@cellraiser.bsky.social · 11mo ago

How do cells adapt morphology to function? In a 🔥 preprint by @zjmaggiexu.bsky.social , with @dudinlab.bsky.social and @amyweeks.bsky.social , we identify a self-organizing single-cell morphology circuit that optimizes the feeding trap structure of the suctorian P. collini. 🧵 tinyurl.com/4k8nv926

The algal pyrenoid fixes ~1/3 of global carbon, relying on a unique membrane-within-condensate architecture. How is this architecture built? We discovered that the protein MITH1 draws membranes into the pyrenoid condensate by promoting wetting! 🌿💧 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Finally out in @Cellcellpress! Proteins with long IDRs are prone to misfolding during protein synthesis. This is prevented by mRNA 3′UTRs that act as mRNA-based IDR chaperones. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

mRNA 3′ UTRs chaperone intrinsically disordered regions to control protein activity

Highly conserved mRNA 3′ UTRs act as co-translational chaperones for intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs), preventing inter-domain misfolding and enabling biogenesis of fully active proteins.

cell.com

Thrilled to see our Deep-Phase paper now online in @cellcellpress.bsky.social! 🎉 The final version expands Deep-Phase across labeling modalities, adds dual-condensate imaging to dissect pathway specificity, and shows greater robustness to batch effects than classical image-analysis methods.

Deep learning of functional perturbations from condensate morphology

A deep learning method quantitatively decodes nucleolar, nuclear speckle, and viral condensate morphology to reveal underlying biochemical states. Applying this framework reveals a previously unrecogn...

cell.com

We're moving to Boston! Excited to share that I'm starting my own lab in the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School in 2027!

Excited to share a new preprint, led by @yasmeen-hamed.bsky.social! It describes a mechanism and potential therapeutic avenue for treating the aging bladder! Thanks to the amazing collab from the Beyder lab, as well as @valeriavasquez.bsky.social, Lichtarge labs! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Four years of New-Bee, and every year the new faces still get me. New wonder, new questions, new sparks. We keep going. 🐝 Sincere thanks again to @rsb.org.uk — proud to have secured this year's Regional Events Grant on behalf of our committee.

Jeff Yau 姚明穎@jeffmyau.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Another successful New-Bee 🐝 neuro program in the 📚! We were delighted to host Elkins HS for a day of neuroscience demos and lessons. The future is bright with these future STEM leaders! 🤩 Special thanks to generous support from @bcmneurosci.bsky.social and @rsb.org.uk.

Bacterial immune proteins have repeatedly evolved to become parts of eukaryotic immunity. But how? Our new preprint uncovers a recent horizontal transfer event & shows how eukaryotes co-opted a toxic bacterial immune protein 🦠🧪🧵 1/

Preprint 🧵! I’m really excited to introduce BIGSMALL, an interleaved multi-magnification cryo-ET scheme bridging molecular and cellular scales in a single acquisition! BIGSMALL = 𝐁road 𝐈nformation 𝐆athering 𝐒trategy by 𝐌ultiscale 𝐀cquisition of lame𝐋𝐋a www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/6)