Basil Greber

hello and welcome to the political genius exam. here is question one. which is a more compelling message:

- the president is sending armies to occupy cities and kidnap and kill people and your town could be next
- a meal at the cheesecake factory that previously cost $100 now costs $104.9

New paper from my group in @science.org : "A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesise itself and its complementary strand" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Outstanding work by @edogia.bsky.social

President Zelensky presented Heraskevytch with a civil honor this evening in Munich. Immediate national hero.

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

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/...

I'm kind of depressed to see countries like Canada frame this as an opportunity. No one benefits from the collapse of US science. And you certainly don't benefit anyone by poaching a few big names while doing no other meaningful increased investment in your own research ecosystem.

Honored to be a finalist for the 2026 Blavanik Awards in the UK in Life Sciences. I’m grateful to past and present lab members, collaborators, colleagues and mentors, who made it possible. It’s even better to share this from
Vietnam while celebrating the Tet holidays with family.

Worth watching this in full. The statement is more powerful than this quote alone. Here is is from USA Today, with alt text.

Also! Rich Ruohonen is a personal injury lawyer and the oldest athlete to ever represent the United States in a Winter Games at 54 years old.

🙈

🧪🧬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...

Anybody know what the threshold was for MSCA funding this time round? Results are coming out and it looks brutal.

More evidence also that the federal administration is NOT pursuing actual criminal activity- they have forced out the very prosecutors who were working on the social services fraud cases that had been the proclaimed casus belli for sending federal forces to MN.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Alberto Castañeda Mondragón says his memory was so jumbled after a beating by immigration officers that he initially could not remember he had a daughter and still struggles to recall treasured moments like the night he taught her to dance. But the violence he endured last month in Minnesota while being detained is seared into his battered brain. He remembers Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulling him from a friend’s car on Jan. 8 outside a St. Paul shopping center and throwing him to the ground, handcuffing him, then punching him and striking his head with a steel baton. He remembers being dragged into an SUV and taken to a detention facility, where he said he was beaten again. He also remembers the emergency room and the intense pain from eight skull fractures and five life-threatening brain hemorrhages.

ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.”

What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.

Structural biologist Alexey Amunts launches new research lab in Shenzhen ‘Shenzhen adds another dimension; it is a place where ideas do not remain ideas for long,’ Amunts says of new position.

We're launching a research lab at SMART. Shenzhen Medical Academy for Research and Translation is a newly established institute with long-term funding mechanisms for internal and external investigators. At full capacity SMART aims to support up to 400 labs.
www.scmp.com/news/china/s...

Karolin Luger - Vilcek Foundation Karolin Luger's research led to the capture of a high resolution image of chromatin, resulting in the development of innovative drug treatments for diseases like cancer.

Unquestionably the result of combined effort from all current and former lab members, support from colleagues @CSU and @CU, and support from @hhmi-science.bsky.social and NIH over decades. A heartfelt 🙏 to my nominators and of course @vilcekfoundation.bsky.social.
vilcek.org/prizes/prize...

Congratulations, Karolin!

2026 Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science Karolin Luger HHMI Investigator University of Colorado

We're proud to join the Vilcek Foundation in recognizing HHMI Investigator Karolin Luger, whose dedication & groundbreaking nucleosome research has led to the development of innovative new drug treatments, including cancer medicines. hhmi.news/49VciEd @vilcekfoundation.bsky.social

Exactly this

I miss these pieces so much...sigh...

One of the best #TeamTomo studies of phase-separated condensates I’ve seen. I am reminded of Rubisco condensates (pyrenoids) for the ability to make such quantitative measurements of molecular organization. It really helps to have intrinsic ~500 kDa fiducials. Awesome mechanistic stuff!! 🧪 🧶🧬 🔬

We are excited to share our new preprint which is now available to read on biorXiv: doi.org/10.64898/202... 🎉🎉🎉

MRC instructs grant review boards to slash funding rates - Research Professional News Boards asked to recommend just three applications for funding, as BBSRC also suspends calls

Both MRC and BBSRC responsive modes now withdrawn until further notice. Existing applications unlikely to succeed (late 2025 round expecting 1-5% success rate).

Listen, I get that UKRI wants to pivot. But killing both at once is devastating.

Let's hope at least one opens by summer... #AcademicSky

The leaders of four major physics infrastructure projects due to receive over £280m from UKRI were told in December they have “not been prioritised” for funding

The projects include an upgrade to the LHC at Cern and a new US particle accelerator
...

Oh dear. Our favourite Fellow of the @royalsociety.org is in the news again

Am I the only one increasingly annoyed by cryo-EM papers not showing *any* experimental density in figures? Sometimes not even in the supplementary material??

Is there any freely accessible info (I do not have a subscription to “Research Professional News”, which is the article being shared in this context) on what will happen to project grants submitted in 2025?

A 300 kV low-base Titan is an “entry-level TEM”? Reading that, I expected to read about tweaking something like an F20 or similar.

The two that first showed us how FACT engages nucleosomes now have their own lab and show us how the remodeler ATRX engages nucleosomes! Incredible resolution with a lot of biochemistry, congrats @codyz.bsky.social @yangliu9.bsky.social and team!

Verge headline: I grew up with Alex Pretti by Kristen Radtke Photo: An old picture of a boy and a girl at a birthday party

"I didn’t realize, in the hours before his name was released to the public, that the man millions of people had seen lying facedown on the pavement from multiple angles of eyewitness video was my childhood best friend."

Read more from @kristenradtke.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/policy/86856...

Exclusive: ‘Pink coat lady’ who recorded fatal encounter between federal officers and Alex Pretti speaks to Anderson Cooper | CNN Anderson speaks with Stella Carlson, the witness who captured crucial video showing exactly what happened when Alex Pretti was shot and killed by DHS officers.

This horrific, and it contains the graphic original video. But if you can stomach it, you should watch it.
edition.cnn.com/2026/01/27/u...

Our paper on the structural and functional basis of the human dimeric OS9–SEL1L–HRD1 ERAD complex, together with @qilabuva.bsky.social, is now out! Huge congratulations to Leo, Emir, and Elina!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...