David B. Sauer

Stories from the scientist who changed how we visualize proteins - Nature Reviews Chemistry Ahead of her 85th birthday, Jane Richardson, Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University, discussed her life in science from making her own telescope to developing the ribbon diagrams for the 3D stru...

Stories from #WomenInScience who changed how we visualize #proteins: Ahead of her 85th birthday, Jane Richardson (Duke Univ, @biophysicalsoc.bsky.social president 2012-13) discussed her life from making a telescope to developing ribbon diagrams for 3D protein structure www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join @naomilpollock.bsky.social, @alangoddard.bsky.social & @alice-rothnie.bsky.social from 15-17 April to understand the basics of membrane protein purification using cutting edge methods, at the 7th UK Workshop on Membrane #Proteins! Places are limited, save £50 if you register before 15 February!

Congenital myasthenic syndrome: is it time for a name change to genetic myasthenic syndrome? Ramdas et al. propose renaming ‘congenital myasthenic syndrome’ as ‘genetic myasthenic syndrome’. They argue that ‘congenital’ misleadingly implies neonata

#WIMMReads 🧪

#MRCWIMM Group Leader Yin Dong is among clinicians and scientists with expertise in congenital #MyasthenicSyndrome suggesting it may be time to update the disease name to reduce misdiagnosis and improve care.
#Neurology #RareDisease

@ndcnoxford.bsky.social @medsci.ox.ac.uk

Celebrating another paper acceptance for the group! @cmd.ox.ac.uk

Congrats to this stellar team!

Time to sign up!

Registration for the joint FEBS/EMBO course on ion channels and transporters in Erice, Italy (May 13-19th 2026) is now open:
meetings.embo.org/event/26-ion...

Please share and repost.

I've reviewed about 150 CVs in the past few days. A few observations: (1) I am sooo impressed by the talent pool out there; (2) do not try to make your CV fit onto one page if it makes things difficult to read - just go multipage, keeping the key messages upfront;

Gave my annual "State of the Group" talk at lab meeting
- 6 Papers published
- 3 Manuscripts in review
- 4 Grants funded
- New research directions and international collaborations

Immensely proud of all our team accomplished in 2025, and excited to share our new results in 2026!

PNAS – Honoring the life of David John “Davo” Mangelsdorf. A life of science, friendship, and joy.

PNAS honors the life of David John “Davo” Mangelsdorf—whose groundbreaking discoveries reshaped nuclear receptor and metabolic biology. Remembered not only for his science, but for his generosity and mentorship. Read more: https://ow.ly/1c8050XUcS8

Structural basis of sodium ion-dependent carnitine transport by OCTN2 Nature Communications - Carnitine uptake by OCTN2 supports fatty acid metabolism. Here, authors report cryo-EM structures of human OCTN2, revealing the mechanism of sodium ion-dependent carnitine...

Our paper on the human carnitine transporter OCTN2 (SLC22A5) is out in @natcomms.nature.com! We solved structures of OCTN2 in multiple states and explored how carnitine transport is Na⁺-dependent, providing a framework for understanding SPCD disease causing variants and drug interactions.

(Top) smFRET enables direct observation of a sodium-coupled transporter executing rapid, stochastic elevator-type motions in lipid bilayers. (Bottom) Thermodynamic modeling shows how highly cooperative co-substrate binding enables tightly coupled transport, without suppressing these motions.

New work out today in PNAS!

Secondary active transporters are everywhere, but direct observation of their structural dynamics is rarely achieved.

Here, we capture the real-time dynamics of a sodium-coupled dicarboxylate transporter using smFRET.

🧵⬇️
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

A deep dive into the conformational dynamics and substrate coupling of VcINDY!

A huge collab of @rubenlgonzalez.bsky.social, Colin D. Kinz-Thompson, @danengw.bsky.social, @chrismulligan.bsky.social, Joe Mindell, David Stokes and many others

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

The Gonzalez Lab at Columbia University is seeking a scientific leader!

Join us in a Research Scientist position, driving single-molecule, structural, and biochemical studies of translation, translational control, and other RNA-based processes.

Apply: apply.interfolio.com/176949

Christmas 2025 party with (some) of our amazing membrane protein team @cmd.ox.ac.uk

#ScientistSpotlight
This week we’re introducing Anna Li, a postdoctoral researcher in the Yin Dong Lab at the #MRCWIMM.

@ndcnoxford.bsky.social @medsci.ox.ac.uk

#WIMMSpotlight #WIMMCommunity #StructuralBiology #CryoEM #IonChannels #Neuroscience

Photo credit: Susan Maxwell

A fascinating story on the history and complexity of T-cell migration by Susan Schwab! #NYUGrossman #NYULangone

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPHN...

The LysP structure is published! Congrats to Emmanuel Nji and colleagues!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Paper accepted!!!

It’s great to see people thinking about tracking errors in Fourier terms! EM_placement tries to infer effects of orientation bias from half maps, but it would be far better to do this directly in the reconstruction process. No surprise it’s people like ZO and Dominika doing this work!

Anyone know if I can submit a bug report to Toyota? Seems like an easy software fix.

Today I learned:
You can brick a Toyota EV with only the window defroster… if engaged before the traction battery 🤦‍♂️

🌟 WeINSPIREBio is hosting its first event!

On Dec 4, we’re running a webinar:

Structures of Success: Career Journeys of Women in Structural Biology

If you work in SB, drug discovery, or just like hearing career stories from brilliant people, join us! And please share 🙏🏼

lnkd.in/ewjD5WPt

#cryoEM

Structural basis of vilazodone dual binding mode to the serotonin transporter - Nature Communications The serotonin transporter (SERT) is a key antidepressant target. Here, authors present a cryo-EM structure where the antidepressant vilazodone spans the main SERT binding site toward a secondary ...

Yay! Our findings on the antidepressant drug vilazodone binding to the serotonin transporter (SERT) are out! We used cryo-electron microscopy and other advanced biophysics to provide data suggesting two high affinity binding poses.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our latest work : Statins are used to lower plasma cholesterol but often come with muscle-related side effects. Using cryo-EM, we show how multiple statin molecules cooperate to bind RyR1, a calcium release channel mainly found in skeletal muscle.
nature.com/articles/s41...

The Swiss: Fluent in German, French, and English. Maybe Italian too.

This USAer: I know ‘Murican, un poco de Spanglish, and… Python 🤷‍♂️

PSA for people with NIH grant periods starting January 1st (including most NIGMS MIRAs): your RPPR is due Saturday, but they haven’t sent out the usual automated reminders, presumably due to the shutdown

Presenting our latest structural biology work and techniques at #PSDI2025

In this slide, the Gembody technology by @mingda-ye.bsky.social and colleagues!

A non-enzymatic role of Nudix hydrolase 5 in repressing purine de novo synthesis Folate metabolism is intricately linked to purine de novo synthesis through the incorporation of folate-derived one-carbon units into the purine scaffold. By investigating chemical and genetic depende...

New in @science.org 🧬

What if an enzyme you thought you knew turned out to control metabolism in a completely new way?

We found that NUDT5 acts as a molecular handbrake on purine synthesis, reshaping how cells make DNA building blocks and respond to cancer drugs.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New online: New York City’s structural biology mosaic

Excited to share our latest @nature.com: How does naloxone (Narcan) stop an opioid overdose? We determined the first GDP-bound μ-opioid receptor–G protein structures and found naloxone traps a novel "latent” state, preventing GDP release and G protein activation.💊🧪 🧵👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Gluebodies Offer a Route To Improve Crystal Reliability and Diversity through Transferable Nanobody Mutations That Introduce Constitutive Close Contacts Design of modular, transferable protein assemblies has broad applicability and in structural biology could help with the ever-troublesome crystallization bottleneck, including finding robustly behaved protein crystals for rapidly characterizing ligands or drug candidates or generating multiple polymorphs to illuminate diverse conformations. Nanobodies as crystallization chaperones are well-established but still unreliable, as we show here. Instead, we show an exemplar of how robust crystallization behavior can be engineered by exploring many combinations (>200) of nanobody surface mutations over several iterations. Critically, what needed testing was crystallization and diffraction quality, since target–nanobody binding affinity is decoupled from crystallizability enhancement. Our study yielded multiple polymorphs, all mediated by the same interface, with dramatically improved resolution and diffraction reliability for some mutants; we thus name them ‘Gluebodies’ (Gbs). We further demonstrate that these Gb mutations do transfer to some other targets, both for achieving robust crystallization in alternative packing forms and for establishing the ability to crystallize a key early stage readout. Since the Gb interface is evidently a favored interaction, it may be broadly applicable for modular assembly; more specifically, this work suggests that Gbs should be routinely attempted for crystallization whenever nanobodies are available.

Gluebodies for improved crystal reliability and alternative crystal forms! (also inspiring Di-Gembody)

Great supports from @cmd.ox.ac.uk @rosfrankinst.bsky.social @diamondlightsource.bsky.social @davidbsauer.bsky.social

Out now in ACS Central Science! @pubs.acs.org
doi.org/10.1021/acsc...