Lillian Chong

WESTPA fans: two new JCTC papers just landed! Great work from Michael Grabe and JC Gumbart. 👇

#chemsky

Thank you!! @westpasoftware.bsky.social

Come and work with us in Bristol Chemistry, ranked #1 in the UK for research. We’re seeking outstanding candidates in:
Engineering biology
Synthetic biology
Chemical biology
Biophysics or biophysical tools
Biocatalysis
www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

This is a good watch. So much potentially impactful science is being stopped for no good reason.

2/n

/fin

Trump Administration Puts New Chokehold on Billions in Health-Research Funding The National Institutes of Health can’t award grants to outside researchers under a new White House restriction.

WSJ story about OMB blocking NIH spending and grant making

www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

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Did you know about the BPS Bridging Funds Program?

If you're a biophysicist navigating a difficult time, this program is for you to defray costs for attending the BPS Annual Meeting!
I am grateful to the @biophysicalsoc.bsky.social for supporting our members!
www.biophysics.org/2026meeting/...

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Out of the 356 drugs that were approved by the FDA from 2010-2019, NIH funding contributed to 354 of them, totaling $187 billion, only 2 were privately funded. From the NYTimes www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Exclusive: Famed protein structure competition nears end as NIH grant money runs out Agency silent on funding renewal for contest that inspired creation of AIs that predicted how proteins would fold

Exclusive: An international scientific competition widely credited with spurring the development of artificial intelligence for biology appears to be on its deathbed. scim.ag/44ukS90

act.standupforscience.net/forms/add-na...

The Radical Development of an Entirely New Painkiller The opioid crisis has made it even more urgent to come up with novel approaches to treating suffering. Finally there’s something effective.

This article says all you need to know about why basic science is the lifeblood of innovation. It’s the long game but there remains no substitute.

Also a favorite example of @jeremymberg.bsky.social

The Radical Development of an Entirely New Painkiller www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

a cartoon of a man holding a frying pan and a spoon with red alert written above him ALT: a cartoon of a man holding a frying pan and a spoon with red alert written above him

ATTENTION: NSF GRANT RECIPIENTS

We received a heads up from a trusted source that you should proactively download/print/screen shot any documentation on research.gov pertaining to your NSF awards, both those that are current and any that have closed in the last 5-6 years.

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Thanks for visiting!! Your talk was fantastic!

Congratulations!!!

✨ Check out @mackevinbraza.bsky.social 's new work on full length APOBEC3B, which shows how the NTD modulates active site opening in the CTD

Collab w/ @adaozlemdemir.bsky.social & Aihara, Herzik, & Harris labs

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Great collaboration with @ltchong.bsky.social on pathway ensemble clustering. 🌟SHINE🌟 is out in @biorxiv-biophys.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1..., and of course @lexinc.bsky.social got it in #MDANCE as well: github.com/mqcomplab/MD...

Great to work with you, Ramon!

spike protein domains and mutations in VOCs

Fiona's tang fish named Dorry matches the spike colors

A behemoth effort from @fionachembot.bsky.social in which she does amazing science (showing how VOCs reshape allosteric pathways) while also making the SARS2 spike color palette match her fish Dorry 😍🫠
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@westpasoftware.bsky.social is partnering with @mdanalysis.bsky.social for Google Summer of Code this year. Please help spread the word!

Catherine Drennan smiles in her lab.

Check out this excellent profile of Catherine Drennan (@drennanlab.bsky.social), Professor of Chemistry and Biology, which was recently published in PNAS:

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

For those following the @prof-ajay-jain.bsky.social /Cleaves/ @wpwalters.bsky.social preprint re: DiffDock @gcorso.bsky.social

I have read some of the back-&-forth between the author groups

As a practitioner in the field for > 20 yrs (academic side), here is my take: 🧵

AlphaFold3 versus experimental structures: assessment of the accuracy in ligand-bound G protein-coupled receptors - PubMed G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are critical drug targets involved in numerous physiological processes, yet many of their structures remain unresolved due to inherent flexibility and diverse ligan...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39643640/ “while AlphaFold3 shows improved performance over AlphaFold2 in predicting overall GPCR backbone architecture, significant discrepancies persist in ligand-binding poses, particularly for ions, peptides, and proteins.”

YouTube video by NVIDIA NVIDIA SC24 Special Address

Really fortunate to have had the honor of being featured as part of NVIDIA SC24 special address by Jensen Huang and Ian Buck. This summarizes a lot of the work that is ongoing in the group highlighting the role of LLMs, multi modality and generative AI.

youtu.be/eKzNKxWUeCE

Check out this bombshell publication by Michael Fischbach @mfgrp.bsky.social and coworkers @stanford-chemh.bsky.social @stanfordmedicine.bsky.social, imagine a cancer immune therapy/vaccine where treatment begins and ends with a painless topical skin treatment! 🤯

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