Joshua Pajak

One of the best parts of being an academic scientist is feeling really good about a grant you just wrote. No guarantees it’ll get funded, but there’s so many good ideas in there that I’m going to pursue regardless 😎

America’s brain drain

No words

Image: A variation on Benjamin Franklin’s “Join, or Die” engraving, originally published in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754. Each segment of the snake has the name of a university sent Trump’s “compact”: Texas, AZ, Vanderbilt, USC, Dartmouth, UVA, Brown, Penn, MIT.

Shared courtesy of my Penn History colleague, Ben Nathans

when UNC scored on the first possession of the first game and Colin Cowherd immediately posted this, and then UNC lost by 34

🧐Checkout our preprint revealing the stepwise firing💥 mechanism of a Contractile Injection System @xujwet.bsky.social&@chipericson.bsky.social trapped the complex by structure-guided engineering🧪 in multiple intermediate states and imaged them by multimodal #cryoEM❄️🔬
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New method paper:
Bennie Lemmens et al @scilifelab.se describe 3D-SPARK, a super-resolution microscopy method that maps changes in DNA replication nanostructures in response to genetic perturbations or drugs, linking spatial cell biology with DNA synthesis dynamics
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Cryo-EM resolves the structure of the archaeal dsDNA virus HFTV1 from head to tail This structure of an archaeal tailed virus (arTV) provides detailed insights into arTV assembly and infection mechanisms.

Out in Science Advances: Our #cryoEM structure of HFTV1, a virus infecting the halophile #archaea. *First full atomic structure (containing all structural proteins) of any tailed virus!* Congrats and thanks to all co-authors and our fantastic collaborators! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I for one was never really into working at coffee shops, but this week I've been writing in a Dunkin' near my mechanic and have been really productive. Must be some Massachusetts finally making its way into my blood.

STRUCTURE OF A NITROGENASE-PII SUPERCOMPLEX
New work from the oxidoreductase half of the group.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I was sad to hear about Professor Boikess’ passing. ANYONE who took organic chemistry at Rutgers for the last several decades was privileged to have learned from him. He was truly a towering figure in chemistry education and on/campus activism.

open access version here: hal.science/hal-05250217

Happy to share new work from my lab by co-authors Peng and Lee-when BRCA1 is absent, RAD51 is busy authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

I loved Århus when I visited! Copenhagen too obviously, but Århus is such a great city.

APE1 active site residue Asn174 stabilizes the AP-site and is essential for catalysis Apurinic/Apyrimidinic (AP)-sites are common and highly mutagenic DNA lesions that can arise spontaneously or as intermediates during Base Excision Repair (BER). The enzyme apurinic/apyrimidinic endonu...

Thrilled to share our lab’s latest work in JBC! 🎉 We uncovered a critical role for APE1 Asn174 in stabilizing AP-sites using mutagenesis, enzymology, crystallography, and MD-simulations. Congrats to Kaitlin Dehart and all the co-authors! Check it out: www.jbc.org/article/S002...

Xiaodong always gives a great talk!

We are recruiting 2 postdocs to work on bacterial motility using a combination of cryoEM, FLM and MD. An exciting collaboration with Kirsty Wan @micromotility.bsky.social Wolfram Moebius @wolframmoebius.bsky.social and Daniel Kattnig. Please see links in the thread below!

Transcription and recombination are two universal DNA-dependent processes, but how they are coordinated remains largely unknown. Here we characterized transcription-recombination priority rules in yeast. 🧵 www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

It is not always safe to repair DNA Damage. Sometimes, cells "just bypass it".

During DNA replication, repair of lesions on DNA can be dangerous. Cells instead "tolerate" DNA damage and focus on finishing replication.

Read our review and find out why and how: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

Last week, Boston received a letter from AG Bondi threatening to prosecute officials and withhold funds unless we cooperate with carrying out mass deportations.

The US Attorney General asked for a response by today, so here it is: stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures.

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to improve the process of Federal

1. Federal funding for research promotes tech, biomedical, and scientific discovery in the US, and provides training for the sci/tech workforce that has brought immeasurable wealth to the US over the past 75 years.

Today's executive order includes a provision that will obliterate both functions.

Brian took a huge risk taking me on as a postdoc, knowing I would need to be trained in simple things like transforming bacteria to more complex things like protein purification and everything in between. He's cultivated a lab that supports trainee growth & I have been so lucky to train in his lab.

Check out my latest preprint, online now! This is my first first author work from Brian's lab. You can check out the biorxiv and Brian's expertly crafted tutorial below.

Check out this new review (with animations, natch) of mechanisms of licensing origins of DNA replication - a wonderful (and continuing!) collaboration with Bruce Stillman @cshlnews.bsky.social and John Diffley @crick.ac.uk! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Engineering of ATP synthase for enhancement of proton-to-ATP ratio - Nature Communications FoF1-ATP synthase converts proton motive force into ATP, with the H+/ATP ratio typically ranging from 2.7 to 5. Here, the authors engineered this enzyme to form multiple peripheral stalks, achieving a...

Engineered ATP synthase with multiple a-subunits!

Engineering of ATP synthase for enhancement of proton-to-ATP ratio
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I miss living right next to the Bulls stadium. What a great team ❤️❤️❤️

Postdoc positions open in my lab (Francis Crick Institute) to study

1. initiation of DNA replication.

2. chromatin replication/epigenetic inheritance.

Great for biochemists, biophysicists and cryo-EM/cryo-tomography scientists.

Deadline 3 August 2025.

crick.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job...

Excited to unveil Boltz-2, our new model capable not only of predicting structures but also binding affinities! Boltz-2 is the first AI model to approach the performance of FEP simulations while being more than 1000x faster! All open-sourced under MIT license! A thread… 🤗🚀

I've seen folks talk about how "in four years" they'll be able to get back to their planned projects and I really don't think that's going to work out. People & projects losing funding now will not be able to hit pause and come back once funding is restored. Hard-won progress & capacity will be lost

Last week to apply! #PhD #Chromatin #StemCells #ProteinStructure #Enhancers #Transcription #LineageCommitment

Registration now open for the Midwest Enzyme Chemistry Conference 2025.
Registration Link: lnkd.in/ggHMWrF5
Event Date: September 27, 2025
Location: University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

It's free to register

Kindly share as we want to grow this amazing community of mechanistic enzymologists.....