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

No, these images are not AI-generated, not even photoshopped. They do look artificial because there is something artificial about them: the extra 150 ppm of CO2 resulting from human activity, which has irretrievably transformed the world.

Auke-Florian 🪹@aukeflorian.nl · 2w ago

Welcome to the Anthropocene 🔥

Calibration Nobel xkcd.com/3275/

Almost exactly 6 months ago, RPN was leaked a document presented to STFC staff that said the council had to reduce spending by £162m by 2029-30 That kicked off months of debate on how cuts would be made But only now has it become clear the total cost savings needed over 4 years is in fact £684m 🧵

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science

As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...

arxiv.org

While this article in Science is getting dragged for leaving ChatGPT trackers in links, there's a subtler issue. The author states "[T]he ability of large language models (LLMs) to predict protein structures and to accelerate the discovery of new materials has revolutionized both fields." (1/7)

Jed Brown@jedbrown.org · 3w ago

Editor in Chief of Science: AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive.

Basically an ad for a Google product, written by Google employees, presented as a scientific paper in Nature. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientist - Nature

Co-Scientist is an AI system for structured scientific thinking and generates research hypotheses for experimental verification.

nature.com

A fully funded PhD position is now open in my lab at the University of Iceland. We are looking for an ambitious researcher to join us in Reykjavik, Iceland to work on targeted protein degradation. Interested? You are welcome to contact me or check out: 🔗https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/452601

Composing a decision letter and deciding on reviewer comments to be addressed/overruled is THE single most important task for which we have editors, IMO. If you get a decision from a journal with zero guidance and a laundry list of unreasonable reviewer demands, the journal editor has FAILED.

You also don't have to do an editor's job of deciding if a paper "fits" or is "impactful enough" for their journal, because you're a scientist and not a marketing agent for the publisher.

Timothy O'Leary@timothyoleary.bsky.social · 4w ago

Dear peer reviewers everywhere: sometimes we feel pressure to find issues with a submission as a demonstration of diligence. But we have to recognise this is a mistake: picking random and sometimes incoherent holes in research add confusion, generates unnecessary work and encourages defensive

Offside xkcd.com/3268/

1/ Very excited to share the first publication from my lab! In this work, we developed an efficient strategy to precisely mutate mammalian histone genes in their native genomic context using CRISPR prime editing: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Identifying critical lysines in mammalian histone H3 with high-throughput CRISPR prime editing - Nature Genetics

This study uses a precise and efficient clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) prime editing system to substitute lysine residues in histone H3, individually or in combinat...

nature.com

School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences at QMUL @qmulsbbs.bsky.social is looking for early/mid career fellows to sponsor. We offer a diverse and welcoming environment, pro-promotion attitude, and excellent facilities. Details via the link below www.qmul.ac.uk/sbbs/researc...

Happy to see many admired colleagues in here! congrats @audeber.bsky.social @frelab.bsky.social @centriolelab.bsky.social @sulianamanley.bsky.social @minclab.bsky.social @yehumoran.bsky.social @matosches.bsky.social (and many healthily offline ones)

EMBO@embo.org · last mo.

Welcome and congratulations to the 60 new members and 11 associate members who have been elected to the EMBO Membership! They join a community of more than 2,200 leading scientists. 🧪 https://www.embo.org/press-releases/seventy-one-leading-scientists-elected-to-the-embo-membership/ #EMBOMembers2026

I wanted to like QED's new 1% preprint ranking. I really did. But the more I looked at the data, the more uncomfortable it made me. Here is my full peer review. open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

My Peer Review of The 1%

I wanted to like QED's new 1% ranking. I don't.

open.substack.com

Beautiful videos nicely explaining microtubules! Congratulations to Renaud Chabrier and Casten Janke 👍 www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVbv...

Microtubules | Scientific Animated Short Film 2026

YouTube video by Drawing Intelligence

youtube.com

“the academic community is enormously heterogeneous and it’s almost impossible to keep everyone happy” Never a truer word said in this analysis of downstream consequences of openness by @jacoates.bsky.social ripplingideas.org/2026/06/26/t...

The 1% club and the rocky road ahead for bioRxiv

The recent launch of qed’s “top 1%” preprint ranking has sparked controversy, with concerns about its arbitrary nature, potential harm to authors, and low-quality inclusions. Whil…

ripplingideas.org

I'm old enough to remember QED's authors said it's just providing an author with internal feedback, and emphatically isn't trying to mimic human review. Now it's compared to human review or journal selectivity and used to rank (other people's) work. The authors seem to ignore the black box aspect1/3

QED Science@qedscience.bsky.social · last mo.

🎉 Meet The 1%. Out of 57,455 bioRxiv life science preprints, QED Science selected 574 exceptional manuscripts through blind evaluation. The 1%: the-one-percent.qedscience.com Good science deserves to be seen. @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social @openrxiv.bsky.social @richardsever.bsky.social

I know it seems like a heretical idea, but one way to figure out if a preprint is really interesting (to you) is... to read the preprint. Then, in the spirit of sharing, send a note to authors: a simple kudos or a more detailed question. I do this a dozen times a year. It's awesome. Try it.

“Glam journals are awful! We shouldn’t care about journal names or IF.” hey, here’s a new metric that we should all use to judge science @qedscience.bsky.social metrics 😒

Pedro Beltrao@pedrobeltrao.bsky.social · last mo.

@qedscience.bsky.social has come up with a really controversial idea - an AI score for scientific impact. This trained score correlates with the impact factor of published preprints and the binning of papers into discrete quality bins accessed by independent scientists. Backlash in 3, 2, 1... (more)

New preprint! In collaboration with the Steinmetz Lab at PSI we report cryo-EM structures of microtubules at up to 1.9 Å (!) resolution & in different nucleotide state mimics, suggesting a mechanism for lattice-induced GTP hydrolysis and why it leads to catastrophe: tinyurl.com/7cjrf863

Glad to see the work of my PhD on the manchette microtubule now out in @embojournal.org: doi.org/10.1038/s443...

SPACA9 and MNMIP1 bridge the seam of spermatid manchette microtubules - The EMBO Journal

The manchette is a transient microtubule (MT)-based structure that is vital for the correct shaping of sperm during spermiogenesis. Throughout spermiogenesis, the manchette retains structural integrity for several days, raising the question of how its MTs are regulated. Here, using cryo-electron tomography of manchettes isolated from rat testes, we find that manchette MT ends are structurally diverse. We show that the MT-binding protein CLASP2 is present throughout the manchette and likely regulates both MT ends. Using cryo-electron microscopy single particle analysis and super-resolution microscopy, we reveal that SPACA9 and MNMIP1 (SH3D21) bind to the seam of manchette MTs from the luminal side. SPACA9 binds to both α- and β-tubulin of protofilament 1 but does not interact directly with protofilament 13, while MNMIP1 binds directly to protofilament 13. MNMIP1 further extends and threads through the MT lattice at the seam. Our study reveals a novel seam MT inner protein complex with a unique binding mode, providing a plausible explanation for MT regulation that maintains manchette integrity over an extended period.

doi.org

With a motivating push from @christlet.bsky.social I made a new Fiji plugin, CurveMorph. The idea was to create a tool for kymograph generation along the dynamic (bending/shaking) filament shapes (microtubules, cilia, neurites, etc). The logo was made using the plugin. github.com/UU-cellbiolo...

Fantastic work of @jojudernatz.bsky.social Revealing a novel seam binding complex in spermatid microtubules

Jo Judernatz@jojudernatz.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Glad to see the work of my PhD on the manchette microtubule now out in @embojournal.org: doi.org/10.1038/s443...

There are lots of exciting opportunities to join the in situ structural biology community at Leeds this Autumn - 2 studentships in the Cheney PhD program (astbury.leeds.ac.uk/cheney-phd/) and I am recruiting a PhD student and research assistant. Please share and send any future tomographers our way!

Cheney Scholarship PhD Programme : The Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology - "Understanding Life in Molecular Detail"

Applications are open for 2 PhD student places.  Closing date for applications is Thursday 26 June, 5pm. Interviews will be held on 9th July 2026. The Cheney Scholarship is a prestigious 4-year PhD pr...

astbury.leeds.ac.uk

I am looking to recruit 2 postdoctoral fellows to the lab to work on a recently funded project focused on class switch recombination in B cells. If you are interested in immunology, gene expression, and RNA and protein single molecule imaging, please reach out (schmi706@msu.edu). Please share!

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

📢🚨 We're hiring! Join my new computational biophysics team at @BirkbeckUoL to study the biomechanics of the kinetochore-microtubule complex using all-atom and coarse-grained MD. 24-month postdoc, London-based. Apply by 7th July: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DRV016/p...

Postdoctoral Researcher at Birkbeck, University of London

Discover an exciting academic career path as a Postdoctoral Researcher at jobs.ac.uk. Don't miss out on this job opportunity - apply today!

jobs.ac.uk

1/🧵 Can transcription factor condensate formation be explained without phase separation? Our new preprint introduces SPARK, a simulation tool that reproduces condensate behavior (clustering, fusion, FRAP) from diffusion & binding kinetics alone. Movie: 60 sec FRAP sim www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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)