One strike, a few spares, and a whole bunch of good news. Cheers to the amazing people making it all happen!

Some orbitals have all the fun. #chemsky #chemchat

Riboseek is a fast RNA/DNA search. More sensitive than nhmmer at 250x speed. Structure-aware realignment produces MSAs approaching rMSA quality. Plus 1.7M precomputed RNA MSAs, and an API to search your own 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 💾 github.com/steineggerla... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/riboseek

When my family is away, my movie choices become totally eclectic. Here some random thoughts about them: #1 Project Hail Mary: Ryan Gosling makes a sci-fi adventure feel human, funny, and completely captivating. He is one of my favorite actors. So talented (and yes…ridiculously good looking)! 1/3

📢Out now on bioRxiv: We used Plant STARR-seq to characterize the species- and condition-specific enhancer activity of over 350,000 sequences derived from four plant species. For more, see below and read the paper at: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Another pyrenoid, another example of convergent evolution to condense Rubisco and turbocharge photosynthesis. This time in a multicellular organism. So much fun exploring a seaweed pyrenoid with @jonasblomme.bsky.social, @mjplevin.bsky.social, @jnb-lab.bsky.social, @james-r-barrett.bsky.social.

Jonas Blomme@jonasblomme.bsky.social · 3w ago

Excited to share our latest preprint on #PhycologyFriday. We map out the carbon fixation pathway for the first time in a multicellular alga, the green seaweed Ulva, and reveal a unique Rubisco-Linker interaction in the pyrenoid, a chloroplast condensate. Below I summarize some key points. #seaweeds

An AI-enabled structural atlas decodes kinase specificity across the human proteome - @harvardcellbio.bsky.social @danafarber.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An AI-enabled structural atlas decodes kinase specificity across the human proteome - Nature Biotechnology

Phosphorylation potential and kinase specificity are assigned for the entire human proteome.

nature.com

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...

Baric at #ASV2926: the most important job of faculty is to give young people the opportunity to pursue their dreams.

Ad forthcoming, but I am hiring for a postdoc or staff scientist to advance related investigations of the virus-host conflict. This position is ~80-100% computational, but with opportunities for experimental work if desired. If interested, shoot me an email with your CV! Reposts appreciated! 15/15

Happy to share the first preprint out of the Nomburg lab! Many aspects of cellular immunity are shared across the tree of life. Here, we show that some of these conserved aspects of cellular immunity are mirrored by conserved effectors of immune antagonism. Thread below! 1/15

bioRxiv Microbiology@biorxiv-microbiol.bsky.social · 2w ago

Conserved folds enable immune antagonism across the tree of life https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.21.739742v1

I have a gut feeling this is going to be a great talk 😉! @caltech.edu

💡New Preprint! How does a cell control which way a membrane bends? ESCRT-III has the remarkable ability to reshape membranes and drive reverse-topology fission, yet a fundamental question has remained: what determines the direction of membrane remodeling? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Direction of ESCRT-III-dependent membrane bending emerges from bilayer asymmetry

In cells, ESCRT-III is unique in mediating fission of membrane necks from inside, a process called reverse-topology fission. Yet, in vitro, the complex primarily assembles outside membrane necks and m...

biorxiv.org

This summer I swapped conference badges for a lab coat and got a few days at the bench and find out whether an idea has legs! And before anyone asks: yes, that's still my UCSF lab coat with elastic knit cuffs. Every other lab coat feels like it was designed by someone who'd never held a pipette…

Thanks, @olibclarke.bsky.social! Identifying this complex is good news for our job security as experimentalists... As of today, we still can’t predict the full assembly with AlphaFold. So here is an #open_challenge: if anyone can recover the whole complex computationally, I’d love to hear from them!

Oli Clarke@olibclarke.bsky.social · last mo.

Amazing stuff, what a structure! Elegant work😍

Thanks for highlighting our preprint, Ben! The follow-up questions are indeed piling up fast & the next grant is writing itself 😅. That said, exciting science is only possible because of great people. So, if any talented biochemist would like to dig into this with us, please do reach out!

Ben Engel@cellarchlab.com · last mo.

The Chlamy chloroplast RNA polymerase paper is here!🤩 It's a beautiful and interesting structure, which raises some interesting questions about evolution. Congrats to @sramundo.bsky.social, @schullerjm.bsky.social, and all your rad peeps for getting this done 💪 #plantscience #cryoEM 🌾🔬🧪

1/7 New preprint: we found that Chlamydomonas carries a giant and unexpectedly elaborate chloroplast RNA polymerase with 12 previously unknown subunits, overturning the idea that the complexity of this organellar enzyme emerged during plant terrestrialization! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The structure of a 2-MDa chloroplast RNA polymerase reveals unexpected evolutionary complexity

Transcription in chloroplasts depends on the Plastid-Encoded RNA polymerase (PEP), a bacterial-derived enzyme whose catalytic core remains encoded by the highly reduced genome inherited from the cyano...

biorxiv.org

American Robin nest 🪺 with those beautiful blue eggs. Biliverdin is deposited on the developing eggshell and in 2+chicken breeds (1+ in Latin America/Europe and 1 in China), an endogenous retrovirus has inserted itself in different locations near SLCO1B3, affecting its regulation! Papers below:

Please share this gift article from The New York Times with friends, family, sceptics, and People who think that studying weird things is a waste of money. Then follow up with meaningful discussion about what I call 'free range science'. Free without subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/20/o...

Opinion | The Science That Turned Lizard Venom Into GLP-1s Is Under Attack

nytimes.com

🌿 From cancer research to food allergies, Prof. Sattely and her team, which includes several Stanford Chemistry students, explore how plant chemistry can improve human health and food security. Learn more: bit.ly/4uFw2m9

Elizabeth Sattely reveals the hidden talents of plants

The Stanford researcher views plants as nature’s ultimate chemists. Her work has the potential to innovate everything from food allergies to cancer treatment.

bit.ly

Do you enjoy the thrill of discovery? Does this photo give you good vibes? Then you might be the right person to join our lab! Current projects range from chloroplast transcription to thylakoid membrane remodeling & we would be happy to welcome bright and motivated people at all career stages!

Beautiful study by @thevirusmc.bsky.social and @plantophagy.bsky.social. Definitely worth a read 👇 Selective autophagy fine-tunes plant immunity to promote cell survival during viral infection | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Selective autophagy fine-tunes plant immunity to promote cell survival during viral infection

RNA viruses co-opt host endomembranes to form replication complexes, often triggering cellular stress and immune responses. Here, we show that Arabidopsis thaliana activates selective autophagy to res...

science.org

Excited to share that I will start my lab this summer as an ECL Unit Leader at RIKEN CSRS! We will study perception by cell-surface receptors across diverse plant species. I’ll be recruiting soon, so please reach out if you’re interested!

Delighted to share our article on the functional expansion of OAS2 via alt. splicing. link.springer.com/article/10.1... A tour de force from PhD student Emma Davies and friends.

Alternative splicing broadens antiviral diversity at the human OAS2 locus - The EMBO Journal

Interferons (IFN) are cytokines that regulate the expression of hundreds of genes during viral infections to generate a broadly antiviral environment in the stimulated cell. Antiviral breadth is provi...

link.springer.com

It's out! A tour-de-force in plant-virus interactions by @thevirusmc.bsky.social @plantophagy.bsky.social and many others @gmivienna.bsky.social @mpi-mp-potsdam.bsky.social. It turns out autophagy prevents virus-induced cell death, allowing plants to tolerate viral infection! A must-read 🌱

Marion Clavel@thevirusmc.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Our work is out now! (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...). We discover a selective autophagy pathway that protects plants from the mess caused by RNA viruses. Intrigued? Follow the spaghetti trail for a summary of our findings🧵-->

At the @gmivienna.bsky.social with Junior Group Leader Dr. Yan Ma, who is going pioneering work on molecular mechanisms of gall formation (using the “Swede” midge and Arabidopsis). Swede=rutabaga. Yan is one of the few studying flies that attack above ground Arabdidopsis, so we are kindred spirits!

Fluorescent timer-based screening of protein turnover modulators in human neurons https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.06.723176v1

‼️ Registration for the Annual MAdLand Meeting 2026 is now open! Join us in Göttingen from Sep 29–Oct 2, 2026 to discuss the latest trends in plant science & reconnect with an amazing #Plantsci community #MAdLand2026 #Evolution 🌱 Learn more and register here: madland-meeting.de/2026/

Beyond proteins and DNA, #lipids are emerging as key players in nuclear biology - shaping nuclear envelope dynamics, mechanosensing, gene regulation and genome stability. Our new Perspective highlights recent advances, open questions, and future directions 👉 journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

Emerging roles of lipids in nuclear function and homeostasis

Summary: Lipids are increasingly recognized as essential regulators of nuclear homeostasis, membrane dynamics, mechanotransduction and genome stability, opening new frontiers for understanding nuclear...

journals.biologists.com