Suckjoon Jun’s lab at UCSD

Congress eliminated public media funding. At a time of deep division, public media brings us together.

Help keep it strong. Join our monthly donors today: n.pr/458sOhq

If you’re eligible for a Pew Latin American Fellowship, please reach out to Suckjoon Jun (Pew ‘13). We have ambitious bluesky projects planned for the next decade, backed by exceptionally strong funding, and we’d love for you to join us!

www.pew.org/en/projects/...

Proteins of amino acid metabolism form large structures and determine diffusion in the cytoplasm!

Our 7-year-long tour-de-force is now out on Bioxriv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks everyone involved! And especially to Jose Losa who pioneered this!

Horizontal gene transfer of the functional archaellum machinery to Bacteria Motility in Archaea is driven by a nanomachinery called the archaellum. So far, archaella have been exclusively described for the archaeal domain; however, a recent study reported the presence of arch...

Would you expect that Bacteria use an archaellum for swimming? We didn't, but we found that some Chloroflexota do! Find the story here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A little thread below 1/n

Our experimental lab w/ the Hilfinger lab @uoft.bsky.social are jointly looking to hire a #postdoc in experimental biological #physics. Exploring noise and dynamics within single-cells and bacterial populations. Please share with anyone you think might be interested.

🚨HUGE SCIENCE WIN ALERT🚨

NIH Grants to be restored en masse!!! Thank you Judge Young for standing up for science!

#StandUpforScience
#SummerFightforScience

🚨 BREAKING: Nearly 4 months the NIH cut its first grants, a judge has ruled that the directives and process that led to cuts are arbitrary and capricious.

"The explanations are bereft of reasoning — virtually in their entirety... unsupported by [facts]."

Each of them are VOID and ILLEGAL, he says.

The U.S. Lit a Beacon for Science. Under Trump, Scientists Fear It’s Dimming

Talked to @KateZernike at @nytimes about my journey and the current moment for scientists in the U.S.

“Ardem Patapoutian’s story is not just the American dream, it is the dream of American science.”

Read the article here. No subscription required:

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/u...

Graphs showing 25 years of budgets for the National Institute of Health, NASA, and the NSF. In all cases, the proposed budget for next year is far, far below any year of the previous quarter century.

There are 2 previous historical cases of countries destroying their science and universities, crippling them for decades: Lysenkoism in the USSR and Nazi Germany. The Trump administration will be the 3rd.
It's not just budgets but research, institutions, expertise, and training the next generation.

On behalf of our lab, we are really proud of them!

Robust Min protein oscillations revealed in living bacterial cells - Nature Physics Bacteria can sustain spatial protein oscillations for a remarkably wide range of protein concentrations. The robustness arises from a conformational switch of a key protein between latent versus activ...

Just out in Nature Physics: Research Briefing (with Suckjoon Jun) on how Min protein oscillations in E. coli remain robust. The secret? A conformational switch that buffers change, and a fresh look at an old system through a physicist’s lens.
📘 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#patternformation

EBSA 2025 Join the 15th EBSA Congress in Rome from June 30 to July 4, 2025! Organized by SIBPA, EBSA, and the Protein Society, with support from IUPAB, the event will take place at the Palazzo dei Congressi. Di...

Looking forward to the European Biophysical Societies meeting. This year it will be in Rome from the 30th of June and the 4th of July. You're still in time to register!
www.ebsa2025.eu

Research Briefing article with Erwin Frey (@physicsoflifelmu.bsky.social) is also out in Nature Physics.

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

Sign The Open Letter to Stand Up For Science Now! Science is under siege. Trump’s latest Executive Order calls for politically appointed science commissars to evaluate research. Join us in adding your name to our open letter condemning Trump’s escala...

🚨 URGENT RESPONSE CALL 🚨

Trump’s Fool’s Gold Science EO is a dangerous sham.
It gives his appointees the power to dismiss entire bodies of research and punish researchers who fail to fall in line with his agenda.

We’ve launched an open letter.

SIGN & SHARE NOW: actionnetwork.org/petitions/op...

Apparently not

My lecture “Nonequilibrium Field Theories and Stochastic Dynamics” is now on YouTube!
Here a short film on my teaching philosophy.
Watch lectures here: www.youtube.com/@PhysicsOfLi...

#Physics #Biophysics #StochasticDynamics #NonequilibriumPhysics #SoftMatter #TheoreticalPhysics #ScienceEducation

NEWS: I just led 112 of my colleagues in demanding answers from the Trump Administration on their funding freeze of the National Science Foundation.

Cutting off NSF funding threatens vital research, stalls innovation, and risks ceding global scientific leadership to China.

Biological patterns: stability through protein reservoirs Biophysicists figure out how bacteria form robust patterns despite changing environmental conditions and fluctuating protein concentrations.

How do bacteria keep their internal patterns stable despite fluctuating protein concentrations? A team led by #LMU biophysicist Erwin Frey @physicsoflifelmu.bsky.social & @junlab.bsky.social found that MinE proteins act as a buffer by switching between active and latent states.

Thank you !

New in Nature Physics! In a great collaboration with @junlab.bsky.social and my students Henrik Weyer & @lwuerthner.bsky.social, we show how Min proteins in E. coli self-organize into robust, efficient patterns ensuring accurate cell division across conditions.
📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Min Proteins for Max Efficiency During Cell Division The Min protein system prevents abnormal cell division in bacteria, but is poorly understood. Researchers from UC San Diego have uncovered how engineered e.coli bacteria control protein levels for max...

The Min protein system prevents abnormal cell division in bacteria, but is poorly understood. A team of researchers, incl @junlab.bsky.social, have uncovered how engineered e.coli bacteria control protein levels for maximum efficiency. Work appears in @natphys.nature.com.

bit.ly/4m1JBt9

Robust and resource-optimal dynamic pattern formation of Min proteins in vivo Nature Physics - Oscillatory Min protein patterns prevent abnormal bacterial cell division. Now it is shown that Min pattern formation is resource efficient and involves wavelength-invariant...

Our paper on the E. coli Min system in vivo with @physicsoflifelmu.bsky.social & Judy Kim (UCSD) has been published in Nature Physics today. Tight integration of experiment and theory, and physiology and biophysics. Incredible perseverance of our young students. rdcu.be/ekIpO

"Science is an investment.

We will put forward a new 500 million package for 2025-2027 to support the best and the brightest researchers and scientists from Europe and around the world."

— President @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu at the ‘Choose Europe for Science' event at La Sorbonne 🇫🇷

And here comes Hongbo

@tzerhan29.bsky.social is giving our biophysics forum talk on his collaboration with Hongbo Zhao on… “intelligent robots”!

Power-law memory governs bacterial adaptation and learning in fluctuating environments How do single-celled organisms adapt and learn to survive in dynamic environments without a nervous system? Here, we provide experimental evidence and a theoretical model demonstrating learning-like b...

Excited to share our new preprint on bacterial learning, with @sifangwei.bsky.social. Here we show that single bacterial cells can continually learn in dynamic environments, due to an underlying reaction network architecture that resemble a recurrent neural network
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Quantum Canada Open Doors 2025 - everybody is invited!

Come join us @sfuphysics.bsky.social #SFU on Burnaby Mountain this Saturday May 3rd for our Quantum Canada Open Doors 2025 event. There will be talks about our quantum research, hands-on activities and lab tours. #YVR 🧪 ⚛️ 🎢 🇨🇦

Top left: Scheme for rrn operon tagging. Two different par sites (parSpMT and parSP1) were placed upstream of rrnA and rrnD, respectively, in the parent strain MG1,655. These sites were visualized by co-expression of their cognate fluorescent ParB proteins (pMT1 GFP-ParB and P1 CFP-ParB). Top middle: Violin plots of the distance between rrnA-rrnD under indicated stress conditions. Top right: A representative image of rrnA-rrnD foci without added stress (top panel) and de-clustering with heat stress (bottom panel). Bottom: Model for σD-mediated rrn clustering. σD-bound RNAP (dark green) is responsible for clustering rrns (blue circles) at the membrane either directly or through other unknown factor(s) (gray hexagon). GroEL/ES (red oval) represses the activity of σH (orange) preventing it from competing with σD for core RNAP. σH is typically localized to the inner membrane and degraded. Upon heat stress, σH levels rise, and GroEL/ES, being diverted to un-folded substrates (pink oval), is unable to repress σH activity.

Long-range #genome interactions in #bacteria. In #Ecoli, 6 out of 7 rRNA #operons cluster by an unknown mechanism. This study shows that high expression of sigma factors σH or FecI, localized in the inner membrane, disrupts clustering, an effect suppressed by σD @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/44b4vQd

Congratulations- can’t believe it took so long