An atlas of eukaryotic centromere architecture reveals recurrent evolutionary dynamics #protists www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Y’all 🤬☠️ www.linkedin.com/posts/wenlu2...

#microscopymonday | Wen Lu | 29 comments

The Unicorn Is Still Waiting 🦄🔬 #MicroscopyMonday I created this cilia-“inspired” fluorescent unicorn last week, hoping Nikon Small World’s ongoing review would bring clarity and restore confidence i...

linkedin.com

Open AI released 722 manuscripts (skipping preprint server) on 372 families of math problems. On average it took their internal model a few hours each. Despite the scientific advance this must be a difficult day for the thousands (?) of people that were working on these. github.com/openai/math

🏆🥇 best-timed article of the year 🤯💥 So interesting to read! Thanks for writing and for making it accessible

Anna Vlasits@annaintegrated.bsky.social · last wk.

Paywall-free version of my article here: archive.is/https://www....

I'm surprised a community of publishing writers can blame AI for the problems of peer review when those same writers cite our study, "the strain on scientific publishing", which characterizes how this problem existed before AI. bit.ly/StrainQSS It's the incentives structure, not the AI. 1/n

Ask the Chefs: Peer Review Capacity — Uncomfortable Truths and Overlooked Conversations - The Scholarly Kitchen

For Peer Review Week 2026, we asked the Chefs two questions: What is one uncomfortable truth about peer review that the scholarly publishing community doesn’t talk about enough? And, beyond recruiting...

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

a glimpse into the future: www-cdn.anthropic.com/22573675ada5... described here: www.anthropic.com/news/claude-... with an expert first author: doi.org/10.1126/scie... doi.org/10.1126/scie... following the pattern from this excellent piece: giorgio.gilest.ro/the-weimar-o...

Claude discovers a novel enzyme system

In early results from our new life sciences research lab, Claude agents found an enzyme system whose function is still unknown.

anthropic.com

Academia has seen inflation in the past 30 years but it is now entering Republic of Weimar territory, with value of knowledge moving from "paper to land". In all this, Open hardware is an act of armed resistance to Technofeudalism. giorgio.gilest.ro/the-weimar-o...

ʙɪɴᴅᴄʀᴀꜰᴛ2 is out, and we're not waiting for the paper. The full code drops today, free for academic and industry use. We're releasing it early so you can start designing right now, and bring its full power to the current Adaptyv competition. github.com/PacesaLab/Bi...

"All corners of academia will soon be flooded with AI-generated research....Maths and CS go first because their entire output is symbol manipulation...Biology comes later not because biologists are cleverer but because the rate-limiting step is physical" giorgio.gilest.ro/the-weimar-o...

We are recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to study DNA damage repair via the homologous recombination pathway using quantitative cell biology approaches. The position will be initially supported for two years by the MSU Research Foundation Postdoctoral Scholars program. Please share! 1/5

🧵 Short thread: I give a seminar to 1st-year biomed PhD students in my program about how to critically read a paper, how to extract VAST amounts of information from the title, and why reading AI summaries instead of struggling with papers is *particularly* bad for trainees. 🧪

They hate immigrants doing farm work and construction, and they hate immigrants working in research labs. They hate immigrants speaking languages they can't understand, and they hate immigrants speaking perfect English. Their little White Nationalist worldview just can't handle it.

Fresh preprint from the lab: CIP2A tetramerization is required for mitotic DNA repair. A fantastic collaboration with @marcelvanvugt.bsky.social. By @laurendehaan.bsky.social, @rebeccaschneeweiss.bsky.social, and colleagues from Groningen, Vienna, Leiden, and Amsterdam 🙌 doi.org/10.64898/202...

So (if I understand this correctly), the way AI (companies) will "solve" all the major problems in maths, biology, and medicine in the next 5 years will be by stealing and building on the ideas of researchers naive enough to think their chats with AI companies would be private.

Very pleased to share this new study: In a truly collaborative effort with the lab of Pim Huis in 't Veld @huis.bsky.social, we combined biochemistry with cell biological and genomic approaches to uncover how CIP2A works in mitotic DNA repair. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

CIP2A tetramerization is required for mitotic DNA repair

DNA lesions that persist in mitosis threaten genome stability. These lesions recruit TOPBP1-CIP2A, a complex crucial to tether and process damaged DNA on mitotic chromosomes. Importantly, CIP2A is syn...

biorxiv.org

If anyone needs yet another review of Nolan’s THE ODYSSEY, this, by Oxford don and poet A. E. Stallings in today’s TLS is pretty good.

These two reviews on centromeres and kinetochores in @natrevmcb.nature.com cap off @andrea-musacchio.bsky.social sabbatical at @stanfordbiochem.bsky.social from @valleefoundation.bsky.social. Long time in the making! Non-paywall versions rdcu.be/fxD9V, rdcu.be/fxEar

Structure and function of the centromere and inner kinetochore

Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology - The kinetochore is a macromolecular complex that assembles on centromeric chromatin and connects spindle microtubules to the chromosome. This Review...

rdcu.be

If this is what happens to a scientific field as a whole when LLMs dominate the workflows of researchers, I can only imagine that the outlook is even worse for any individual researcher who is soldiering on without using them. 😞

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 3mo ago

13. Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well.

I'd like to be in cat. 3, but the 1% cut-off locks me in cat. 2.. For me it defeats all possible positive aspects in a dominant negative manner. AI to browse claims across papers would be great. But please avoid quality scores and cut-offs. For one because they focus on words >> data+figure quality

Richard Sever@richardsever.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I suspect reactions will fall into 3 categories: 1) excitement ‘because AI’; 2) revulsion; 3) questions whether this may be the beginning of more multi-dimensional approaches to ranking papers without reading them (which many want) 1/2

We lost a scientific hero today, Bob Lehman. Here is a 🧪🧵I posted last year about Bob.

Vaughn Smider, MD, PhD@vvsmider.bsky.social · 2y ago

🧪I.Robert (Bob) Lehman was a biochemistry professor at Stanford and on my thesis committee. Our labs had joint lab mtgs so I got to interact with him regularly over several years.

TL;DR: We've identified more than 100 cases of apparent manipulation in Thermo Fisher Scientific's antibody verification data. @sholtodavid.bsky.social @johanduchene.bsky.social reeserichardson.blog/2026/05/28/h...

How much of Thermo Fisher’s antibody data has been manipulated?

We’ve documented more than 100 instances of apparent data manipulation in Thermo’s catalog

reeserichardson.blog

Reposting this from April 1, 2007 in honor of Craig Venter. I did this as an April Fool's joke - sharing it as a PDF. I got stressed when I found out Craig had seen it and knew it was by me. But he loved it and said it was OK to share it more widely. So then I posted it on the web.

Using light-activated CRISPR in zebrafish, we triggered synchronized DNA breaks and track the repair process. ⚡🐟⚡ 

 Well ... DNA repair is very different in embryos compared to tissue culture cells. Embryos repair DNA breaks incredibly fast - within minutes! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Pollution levels in Paris after 10 years of advancing sustainable transport.

Excited to share our discovery of a new programmable RNA-guided DNA-targeting system hiding inside bacteriophages that predates CRISPR. We call it VIPR (Viral Interference Programmable Repeat), and it uses an entirely new logic to find its targets. Thread + link below.

Since our preprint on the ETC-ATP synthase supercomplex has attracted attention, I would like to introduce the platform we used, Langtaosha. It was launched by SMART together with several other institutions with support from Open Life Science Alliance, aiming for long-term open infrastructure 1/4

Alexey Amunts@amunts.bsky.social · 6mo ago

65 years after Peter Mitchell’s chemiosmotic theory, we report an association between ATP synthase and the electron transport chain. In the preprint led by @longzhou88.bsky.social, we describe a large supercomplex and show how the supramolecular organization contribute to oxidative phosphorylation 🧵

I hate having to do the "look, they're normal just like us" post, but sometimes you have to do that when American propaganda tries to convince everyone Iranians are "animals".

Mark Chadbourn@chadbourn.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Reporter: “How would it not be a war crime to strike Iran’s bridges and power plants?” Trump: “They’re animals.”

I'm reviewing Sapiens, one page at a time! It's a little bit fact-checking and a little-bit soul-searching combined into a lot of feelings... ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/03/sapi...

"Sapiens": One page at a time

I've been co-teaching a course for several years in which we read Sapiens . I think I've read it eight times, now. That explains the gumband...

ecodevoevo.blogspot.com

ROCKET 🚀 inference-time optimization of AlphaFold to fit structural data is published! rdcu.be/fa9YH Since our preprint, we’ve pushed it to regimes where other methods break: low resolution, weak signal, real experimental edge cases. Here’s what we learned: 1/15

AlphaFold as a prior: experimental structure determination conditioned on a pretrained neural network

Nature Methods - ROCKET improves experimental structure elucidation by integrating implicit structural knowledge from OpenFold, a trainable reimplementation of AlphaFold2, with X-ray...

rdcu.be