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 · 2mo 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 · 3mo 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 · 5mo 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 · 5mo 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

This! AlphaFold is PDB + UniProt + Deep learning. No data sharing, no curation, no data standards, no AlphaFold.

In memoriam Fazly Ataullakhanov was a biophysicist with a rich heritage, and a strong scientific legacy. An ethnic Tadjik, born in Samarkand (Soviet Uzbekistan), educated in Moscow, made his best scientific contributions in English, collaborating with international researchers in the USA. /1

Congratulations Vladimir and team! A lot more in the paper, just posting some of Figure 2 here since growing and shrinking microtubules on the grid before freezing and cryoET is amazing

Vladimir Volkov 🇺🇦@vladimirvolkov.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Happy to see the first paper from the lab published in the EMBO J today: link.springer.com/article/10.1... In it, we reconstitute self-assembling cooperative oligomers of human Ndc80 and Ska kinetochore complexes that stabilise microtubule ends, and study these samples using cryoET and TIRF

A week ago, we had an open conversation amongst senior academics in leadership roles and their use of LLMs (in both their leadership capacities and individually). Small group, not representative, but it already taught me a great deal about the diversity of perspectives (& their consequences). 1/

Lees Huxley.

Our paper is now out in Nature: “Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres” www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres. 1/14

Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres - Nature

Evolutionarily related ‘proto-point’ centromeres providing resolution to the evolutionary origins of point centromeres are identified in yeast, and comparison shows they evolved in an ancestor with re...

nature.com

If you’ve not stopped using Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, etc…), now is a really good time to stop. This is viscerally horrifying.

Dexerto@dexerto.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Meta has patented AI that can run a dead person's account, continuing to post and chat on their behalf It can message and video call by replicating a user's online behavior using their past data

Let's try this #AcademicSky 1 fav, 1 funny, strange, or unexpected scientific anecdote about a paper, a scientist, a fact, hoping that some will be new to you.

🧪🧬New preprint We present cryo-EM structures of reconstituted CTCF–nucleosome complexes, showing CTCF dimerization drives nucleosome oligomerization into defined higher-order assemblies. Disrupting CTCF–CTCF interfaces in mESCs reduces looping and impairs differentiation. tinyurl.com/CTCF-nucleos...

European Scientists who said NO to Epstein-funding are the heroines of this hour🦸‍♀️ They show: It was your choice to SAY NO to Epstein's $ as scientist- you just had to have ethics & a spine Kudos to Physicist IVETTE FUENTES who said NO She was working at @quantumunivie.bsky.social @univie.ac.at

PhD position in my lab!

We speak to Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis about the United States under Donald Trump and its attempts to reshape the post-World War II international consensus. www.democracynow.org/2026/1/22/ya...

“An Abomination”: Yanis Varoufakis on Trump’s “Board of Peace” & Threat to Democratic World Order

We speak to Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis about the United States under Donald Trump and its attempts to reshape the post-World War II international consensus. “Trump has all his work done for him ...

democracynow.org