BREAKING NEWS The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.”
Michael Westberg
@westberglab.com
Assistant Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark | biophysical chemistry PhD | into chembio, synbio, protein design, photochem, microscopy | 2018-2022 at Stanford Bio-X | westberglab.com
Excited to share a new study from our lab in Cell: “Non-invasive control of gene editing in vivo by photoswitchable Cas12f and focused ultrasound” We engineered a compact CRISPR system that can be activated at specific locations in the body using focused ultrasound (🧵) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
Non-invasive control of gene editing in vivo by photoswitchable Cas12f and focused ultrasound
Remote activation of a single-AAV-deliverable photoswitchable Cas12f system enables precise spatial and temporal control of genome editing in deep tissues without surgery or implanted devices.
cell.com
Come join the new Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Design as a group leader Cool science in a great scientific environment in wonderful and very family friendly Copenhagen There are two positions that can either be at TT assistant or associate prof level employment.ku.dk/tenure-track...
Tenure-track Assistant Professor or Associate Professor of De novo Protein Design
The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Design at the University of Copenhagen seeks to appoint two new group leaders in de novo protein design from 1 February 2027 or as soon as possible thereafter. These positions will be at the Assistant or Associate Professor level and associated with the Department of Biology (Faculty of Science) or the Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology (Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences).
employment.ku.dk
The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)
Periodic reminder that the fluorescent compound in mammalian cell culture media, such as DMEM, is riboflavin (not phenol red)
I’m biased 🇩🇰, but this is quite nice to read: I thought science hinged on prestige. Moving abroad made me reassess my priorities www.science.org/content/arti...
I thought science hinged on prestige. Moving abroad made me reassess my priorities
In Denmark, this Ph.D. student fell in love with an egalitarian society that values work-life balance
science.org
Speak up to prevent a major loss for the field. CASP, which helped shaping structural biology including AlphaFold is on the verge of shutting down. NIH funding has lapsed, UC Davis support ends and the core team is being let go. Painfully shortsighted.
Exclusive: Famed protein structure competition nears end as NIH grant money runs out
Agency silent on funding renewal for contest that inspired creation of AIs that predicted how proteins would fold
science.org
Budget released today: 40% cut to NIH 50% cut to NSF If enacted, this will destroy academic research in the United States. It will also have a major trickle down effect on the entire academic ecosystem
Super excited to share a new preprint from our lab on design of small-molecule binding proteins using neural networks! The paper has a bit of everything. A new graph neural network, new design algorithms, and experimental validation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵🧪
Zero-shot design of drug-binding proteins via neural selection-expansion
Computational design of molecular recognition remains challenging despite advances in deep learning. The design of proteins that bind to small molecules has been particularly difficult because it requ...
biorxiv.org
Small proteins can be more complex than they look! We know proteins fluctuate between different conformations- but by how much? How does it vary from protein to protein? Can highly stable domains have low stability segments? @ajrferrari.bsky.social experimentally tested >5,000 domains to find out!
Just got an email from the Fulbright Association. As of right now, funding has been cut off to 12,500 US citizens currently abroad and and more than 7,400 foreigner scholars and students in the United States
We are looking for a postdoc with an interdisciplinary drive to join our team at Aarhus University. The project, funded by the Villum Foundation, focuses on leveraging recent advances in de novo protein design to develop novel photoactive proteins.
Postdoc in Protein Design of Photoactive Proteins - Vacancy at Aarhus University
Vacancy at Chemistry, Dept. of, Aarhus University
international.au.dk
Are you serious @royalsociety.org?? He is trying to destroy science, spreading dangerous misinformation, inciting violence & your response is to do nothing? So what’s your purpose then? What do you exist for? Other than being elite? 🧪 #academicsky www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Elon Musk survives as fellow of Royal Society despite anger among scientists
Questions remain over whether further action will be taken after resignations and calls for the Tesla CEO to be expelled
theguardian.com
Hey #chemsky and beyond, with all that is going on, I am curious what expensive, high margin molecules we could provide to the community for free. What things do you use all the time, cost way too much, and would make a difference? Alexa Fluor 488 NHS? Other dyes? Other molecule?
Instruktøren for kryolit-dokumentaren tager til genmæle i P1 Orientering - men svarene er langt fra overbevisende: www.dr.dk/lyd/p1/p1-or... For mig at se er dokumentaren et eksempel på misinformation, som det oftest praksiseres i politik og på sociale medier. 🧵 (1/4)
P1 Orientering | Tirsdag 11. feb. 2025 | DR LYD
Er DR-dokumentaren om kryolit i Grønland egentlig retvisende? Er Elon Musks drøm om at købe OpenAI realistisk? Og går EU-regulering af AI for langt? Dagens værter: August Stenbroen og Pernille Rudbæ...
dr.dk
Excited to share our latest preprint evaluating AlphaFold3, Boltz-1, Chai-1 and Protenix for predicting protein-ligand interactions, featuring our newly introduced benchmark dataset 🌹Runs N’ Poses🌹! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵👇 (1/n)
Have protein-ligand co-folding methods moved beyond memorisation?
Deep learning has driven major breakthroughs in protein structure prediction, however the next critical advance is accurately predicting how proteins interact with other molecules, especially small mo...
biorxiv.org
Special Bluetorial: The benefits of different life experiences The scientific community has folks with a very wide range of life experiences. We have a lot to learn from one another.
a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on
ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on
media.tenor.com
New preprint from our group! We propose SHAPES, a set of metrics to quantify the distributional coverage of generative models of protein structures with embeddings at different structural hierarchies and quantify undersampling / extrapolation behaviors.
Yes it's important people understand a preprint hasn't been peer-reviewed. BUT it's also important to understand that what "peer-reviewed" means varies considerably, in some cases signifying nothing... www.science.org/content/arti...
Preprints often make news. Many people don’t know what they are
The public needs context about unreviewed manuscripts, survey suggests
science.org
Aside from the fact that I love Doritos, Cheetos, and all snacks unnaturally orange, I appreciate the physics and potential impact on optical imaging of this paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Achieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing molecules
Optical imaging plays a central role in biology and medicine but is hindered by light scattering in live tissue. We report the counterintuitive observation that strongly absorbing molecules can achiev...
science.org
Many people talk about the "Golden Age of Antibiotics", but I hadn't seen it visualized properly. Just how many types of antibiotics were discovered during that time? So, I visualized it myself!
1/ In two back-to-back papers, we present our de novo TRACeR platform for targeting MHC-I and MHC-II antigens TRACeR for MHC-I: go.nature.com/4gcLzn5 TRACeR for MHC-II: go.nature.com/4gj5OQk
Back by popular demand, I present PPI Prediction Challenge #2. My claim: I AM SKEPTICAL COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES CAN PREDICT WHETHER TWO PROTEINS INTERACT. Someone prove me wrong (take two). docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... 1/n
PPI Prediction Challenge #2
For this protein-protein interaction prediction challenge, we present three target proteins: KRAS, RAF (the KRAS binding domain), and Mdm2. For each target protein, we are providing you a list of 8 po...
docs.google.com
You may have seen a recent pre-print [1] from Jain et al. with strongly worded claims against the experimental results in our DiffDock paper [2]. We initially declined to respond as we saw that this preprint contained falsehoods, misleading comparisons, seemingly deliberate omissions, ...1/n
Super excited to preprint our work on developing a Biomolecular Emulator (BioEmu): Scalable emulation of protein equilibrium ensembles with generative deep learning from @msftresearch.bsky.social ch AI for Science. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
PIONEERS When I assumed the position as Director of NIGMS in 2003, Dr. Zerhouni's project for stimulating activities across NIH, The NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, was under active development. The Roadmap included a range of different funding opportunities. 1/n www.science.org/content/arti...
NIH's Roadmap to the Future
science.org
We engineered bacteriorhodopsin to be soluble. It binds retinal and can photocycle! X-ray structure reveals conserved binding pocket with 0.8 Å all atom RMSD to WT BR. All this became possible due to hard work by Andrey Nikolaev and the team 🙏 #proteindesign biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
Crosspost from X: After showing that AF2 can be used to design very large proteins by performing #RSO, I am happy to share another fun project we did: the #af2cycler @sokrypton.org @hendrikdietz.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Alphafold2 refinement improves designability of large de novo proteins
Recent advances in computational protein design have enabled the creation of novel proteins for a variety of purposes. The capability for producing custom-shape high-quality backbones for very large p...
biorxiv.org