Humanity is notorious for leaving problems for the next generations, but animals reveal the biology: C. elegans develop germline tumors if THEIR GRAND GRANDPARENTS’ cells fail to clear garbage from their body cavity… What the hell, you ask? Read our new preprint! 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#czechcellence on tap
Agreed!! A very exciting direction in structural biology
Videos of the 2026 @biophysicalsoc.bsky.social Award Lectures are now online, including the Agnes Pockel Award Lecture by @veatchlab.bsky.social! It's here: www.biophysics.org/video-librar...
Check out our new preprint! We show that tension drives mixing of phase separated membranes!
Thank you so much for this perspective, Elise...it's exciting to see lipids getting a little time in the spotlight!! 🤩 #lipidtime @elisecutts.bsky.social
And finally, our own recent work...by tuning and minimizing the lipidome of the genomically minimal cell JCVI-Syn3A, we showed that two lipids are sufficient (but not optimal) for life...introducing a platform to explore the role of lipidome complexity and its evolution.
doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Rana Ashkar then showed that the long-standing paradox of how cholesterol affects membrane stiffness disappears when you look at the right scale: what actually matters is lipid packing density.
doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Maria Makarova @mashauob.bsky.social showed how some yeast can adapt to anaerobic growth: rather than using unsaturated fats (which usually require oxygen to make), they switch to hopanoids and saturated lipids with mismatched tail lengths that mimic the same physical effect.
doi.org/10.1016/j.jb...
Jacob Winnikoff revealed how deep-sea comb jellies adapt to the crushing pressures of the deep by controlling membrane curvature, using a specific class of ether-linked lipids (plasmalogens) to keep their membranes stable.
doi.org/10.1126/scie...
Jochen Brocks kicked us off with a stunning result: ancient lipid fossils in billion-year-old rocks reveal a "Protosterol Biota" ...a lost world of early eukaryotes that dominated the oceans for nearly a billion years before the ancestors of modern eukaryotes emerged
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Thank you so much Anirban, I'm humbled! It was a real joy to chair this session on the evolution of membrane phenotypes...it was an incredible lineup from ancient protosterol "fossils" to unified laws of membrane elasticity. I've pasted the key papers from the session below! 🧵 #BPS2026
Wonderful to meet @ayushpanda2002.bsky.social in person at #BPS2026 in San Francisco! Former master’s student in Dresden, now starting his PhD in biophysics at Michigan…excited to see where his research takes him! 🦠🔬
Good morning San Francisco, and #BPS2026 … looking forward to the Membrane Structure and Function subsection meeting today!
😍 - also a great outcome of a meeting at #TCTEAC #WoodstockOfBio
Lipid geeks rise up!
"James' brain seemed to have had a little short-circuit when I asked him what kind of scientist he is." YES that our beloved #lipidlove @jamessaenz.bsky.social . Great interview and even better a fun old picture of him. I have a lot more, just in case 😂
Lipids are kind of the ignored middle children of origins of life research. It's time they got a bit of attention, too!
This week's post is a Q&A with geoscientist-turned-??? (interdisciplinary folks know the struggle) @jamessaenz.bsky.social about why there's no cutting the fat from origins. 🧪
Scientists have seen Asgard archaea crawling for the first time. When it comes to the origin of eukaryotes, this is like seeing a feathered dinosaur in the wild. (Video courtesy of Philipp Ralder)
New paper from my team detailing a greatly expanded genomic database of Asgard archaea revealing of high energy metabolism those related to eukaryotes! Led by @katyappler.bsky.social lots of help from @jameslingford.bsky.social @valdeanda.bsky.social @kassipan.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415...
Ooooh. Cool new paper on origins of life. A simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Junior RNA Scientists, tomorrow Feb 11th at 10AM ET is the first RNA Collaborative Seminar Series of 2026 hosted by the University of Rochester Center for RNA & the Bay Area RNA Club! Join us to hear about emerging RNA research. Sign up for zoom registration here: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
Lipids challenge ligands to control receptors
The behaviour of a receptor protein can be influenced by the presence of certain lipids in the membrane it is embedded in.
🔗 buff.ly/G1Zl6cZ
I present the most interesting graph ever made.
HUMAN ON BICYCLE beats every other living thing.
www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hu...
Thrilled to share our latest study, led by @reikatei.bsky.social, in @natchembio.nature.com! We began by asking a simple question—how do cells know if they have too much of a lipid in a particular membrane, and how do they respond to rectify this imbalance?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
More info 👇
I miss New England winters too! Real snow, proper cold, and…sun. But German winters are better for biking 🚴🤩
New paper out! Here's a puzzle: phototrophy, the ability to use light for energy, is one of life's great innovations. It evolved early and transformed the biosphere. But it evolved 2x. Why not just once, why not more? Our work suggests the answer is priority effects.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
reading about organisms that aren’t your specialty is like
margins of the quorbus eplungulate, ploobular processes bent posteriorly towards the foobulum
define term “eplungulate”
- lacking plungae. synonym: thubulous
How do lipids shape life? I explore this question in my recent talk for the Build-a-Cell 🦠 seminar series. Thanks to @kateadamala.bsky.social for hosting! Watch it here: youtu.be/JnF7hPCiSbI?...
