Xiaohan Li

Suyang Zhang smiles in front of a blurred laboratory background

Exciting opportunity for a #postdoc to join @suyangzhang.bsky.social’s group in the LMB Structural Studies Division to investigate co-transcriptional splicing using cryo-EM and biochemistry.
Read more: www.nature.com/naturecareer...
Apply by 11 FEB
#PostdocJobs #ScienceJobs

Why do mated songbirds sing beautifully coordinated duets? My Ph.D. work showed that duets are cooperative signals that pairs use to defend their shared territory. This visual summary is based on Logue & Gammon 2004 Animal Behaviour 68: 521-531 and Logue 2005 Cognition, Brain, Behavior 9:497-510.

Roadmap for Condensates in Cell Biology Biomolecular condensates govern essential cellular processes yet elude description by traditional equilibrium models. This roadmap, distilled from structured discussions at a workshop and reflecting t...

Physicists' perspective on the future direction of condensates in Cell Biology.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.03677

Knowledge is about interacting with nature, making reasoning, then communicating the excitements and discovery to the community; not by chewing “decoders” output and then throw random things to “encoders” and sell the outputs again.

Really don’t understand why loads of people are advocating delegation of paper reading and reference searching to AI, and even paper-writing using AI. It’s like volunteering to be left out of the discovery process and intellectual works, happily living as a slave to the “transformers”.

Experimental structures provide valuable hypotheses and accelerate but do not replace evolutionary and statistical analyses of protein sequences

Very exciting project! Trafficking, IDRs, and structural biology!

Apologies I was a bit unclear with "unstructured in functional complex"; I was suggesting the possibility of structured regions interact to provide specificity (frequently enthalpy contributions), IDRs remain unstructured to tune entropic effects of the system, keeping them dynamic.

Intrinsically disordered proteins drive membrane curvature - Nature Communications Proteins that bend membranes often contain curvature-promoting structural motifs such as wedges or crescent-shaped domains. Busch et al.report that intrinsically disordered domains can also drive memb...

For the "remain disordered in functional state", I tend to think most AF2 predicted low pLDDT regions belongs to this class, frequently doesn't involve in a binding event. One quick example in my head is the epsin/AP180 example www.nature.com/articles/nco...

I think one classic example of both disordered then to stable helical transition, might be the ACTR-CBP system. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11823864/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24449148/

In this case we may also want to revisit the definition of IDRs and reclassify…we used to define them as no stable secondary/tertiary structures in solution, but this may simply be a reflection of good solvation. We may redefine “canonical IDRs” as being unstructured even in functional complexes

I guess in this case the only case of exception might be when two IDRs interact with each other they co-fold with each other which gives a specific new interface… but considering the amount of entropic penalty from IDR-IDR to complete structure, this might be rare…

This is a great point! In this case, would you think it might also be a good idea to treat IDR-IDR interaction differently than IDR-folded domain interaction, independent of the affinity? Maybe as long as one of the partner is folded, the interface would already be specified…

Postdoc opportunity with Michel Goedert and myself to work on #cryoEM/#cryoET structures of #amyloids. Feel free to email me with any questions you might have.

mrc.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/...

Hi Andrea, I really like your paper cited here. The figure highlights the importance of cellular context not just for phase separation studies, but for interpretation of most in vitro data involving interactions between macromolecules in general as well, especially for low affinity ones...

Our review on Integrative modelling of biomolecular dynamics 💃 is now live at COSB

We discuss approaches to integrate computational methods with time-dependent & time-resolved experiments to study protein dynamics

With @dariagusew.bsky.social & Carl G. Henning Hansen
doi.org/10.1016/j.sb...

I found a tiny octopus on the tide pool🐙✨️

Small as it is, it’s every bit an octopus ... and absolutely adorable!!

It even shoots ink🫧 ͛.*

I agree. I think protein folding is evidence that one can form specific structures that are thermodynamically driven by non-specific, dynamic interactions, with additional contributions to specificity from h-bonds etc (that probably contribute less to the "driving" force).

The structure of most folded proteins are stabilised by the hydrophobic effect which in some sense is quite fuzzy. And the hydrophobic cores of proteins can be quite dynamic.

Many congrats Shahar! Really beautiful work and great datasets to look at!

Protein surface chemistry encodes an adaptive tolerance to desiccation Desiccated cells lose over 85% of their water content and experience widespread biomolecular dysfunction. Romero-Pérez et al. show that the yeast proteome contains a subset of proteins that are desicc...

Now published in @cp-cellsystems.bsky.social - we look at the chemical features that make proteins tolerant to dehydration, and the functions these proteins fill. 🏜️🚱 tinyurl.com/bsfy56yt

yep, this is very concerning.

Some have already tried to raise the alarm in 2022, and since then, the “quality” of AI-generated images has only improved...

www.cell.com/patterns/ful...

Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact - Nature Machine Intelligence Suzgun et al. find that current large language models cannot reliably distinguish between belief, knowledge and fact, raising concerns for their use in healthcare, law and journalism, where such disti...

Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact #AI

Failure to make such distinctions can mislead diagnoses, distort judicial judgments and amplify misinformation.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Electrostatic changes enabled the diversification of an exocyst subunit via protein complex escape - Nature Plants The evolutionary diversification of an exocyst subunit was enabled by electrostatic shifts leading to its dissociation from the ancestral complex.

If you’re into protein evolution, molecular innovation, or just good scientific detective work — we hope you enjoy reading this story as much as we loved uncovering it.

Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Happy Halloween 👻🌿

We (@sobuelow.bsky.social) developed AF-CALVADOS to integrate AlphaFold and CALVADOS to simulate flexible multidomain proteins at scale

See preprint for:
— Ensembles of >12000 full-length human proteins
— Analysis of IDRs in >1500 TFs

📜 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
💾 github.com/KULL-Centre/...

If you are interested in membrane trafficking and IDPRs, please join us!

Best practices & tools in R & Python for statistical processing and visualization of #Lipidomics & #Metabolomics data

Data imputation/normalization
Batch correction
Data visualization
Statistical models

Instrumental handbook, adoptable for other omics

#NatComms 2025
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

2026 Intrinsically Disordered Proteins Conference GRC The 2026 Gordon Research Conference on Intrinsically Disordered Proteins will be held in Les Diablerets, Vaud (fr) Switzerland. Apply today to reserve your spot.

🚨🚨The GRC on Intrinsically Disordered Proteins #IDPs is back!! 🍝🧵🏔️Join us for cutting-edge IDP science, great discussions, and mountain views 🌄🍝
📅 June 21-26, 2026 | Les Diablerets, Switzerland
👉 Details & registration: grc.org/intrinsicall...

Why are transcription factors disordered? Come join us in Oxford as a postdoc and we'll find out together!

Help publish 3 mature projects, AND develop cool new single molecule fluorescence binding assays!

biophysics
transcription
protein:DNA interactions

my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Amazing! A lot of congrats Alex!