Brett Collins

A line graph showing NSF grant awards made through 2/27/26 for fiscal year 2026 compared with grant awards for fiscal years 2021-2025.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26)

Directorates to follow

1/10

Lazy morning building a synaptic vesicle from scratch. Super WIP and not correct. Much to do.

But it has the coolest guys imho:
- Amber: Vesicular glutamate transporter (VGluT)
- Red: V-ATPase

No membrane. Need VAMP complex, etc.

#screenshotsunday

A man standing up in a crowded room of people sitting. He is dressed in workman's clothes and has his head raised as if speaking up when not necessarily belonging there.

We are a rich enough country to be funding 37% of all basic research proposals, not just considering "the best" 37% and then maybe only funding 12% in the end.

Dziurdzik, Sridhar, Conibear et al. identify a conserved adaptor that recruits BLTP2-like proteins to ER–plasma membrane contacts by binding helical projections on their lipid transfer channel to maintain #lipid homeostasis. rupress.org/jcb/article/...

#MembraneContactSites #ER_literature

It’s FREE to publish in Journal of Cell Science – there are no page charges, colour charges or hidden fees. And if your institution has a Read & Publish agreement, you can publish immediate OA free of charge.

Find out more: journals.biologists.com/jcs/pages/re...

#forscientists
#notforprofit

Great journal, great philosophy ❤️❤️❤️

How China’s universities joined the global elite Investment by Beijing has transformed the country’s institutions despite lingering questions about research quality and intellectual freedom

“Chinese universities’ climbing in global rankings is real. It’s not a ‘mystery bounce’ but the result of 3 decades of sustained, targeted investment,”

Sustained, targeted investment .. an innovative intervention!

An approach for the U.K. to consider?!

giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya on His Mission to Rebuild Public Trust in the NIH and CDC He discusses "DEI" research, campus funding freezes, ACIP, and the path forward for the nation's public health infrastructure

OK. Buckle up. Here goes...

Here is the video and the transcript.

substack.com/home/post/p-...

1/n

CLCC1 governs ER bilayer equilibration to maintain lipid homeostasis - Nature Phospholipid scrambling at the endoplasmic reticulum is essential for establishing a dynamic equilibrium to maintain cellular homeostasis.

Excited to share what we uncovered using in-tissue cryo-ET in mouse liver: a structural snapshot of lipid droplet biogenesis in situ. Timely reading—particularly after a lipid-rich Chinese New Year😂 The lipid homeostasis story governed by CLCC1 with more details here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My team project was in the top 10% of the losers 👐
I will never like this system. Bring back the old system.
Let me submit 10 pages to discipline experts.

I am so grateful to the Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences for this honor. Can’t wait to be back to the lab and celebrate with lab members on this special recognition of their hard work.

This is happening tomorrow! Looking forward to seeing all the #membranes enthusiasts on zoom!

CLCC1 promotes hepatic neutral lipid flux and nuclear pore complex assembly - Nature CRISPR–Cas9 screening identifies CLCC1 as a factor that increases neutral lipid flux to prevent hepatic steatosis and promotes nuclear pore complex assembly by promoting membrane bending and fusi...

Sooo happy to share our new paper in @nature.com “CLCC1 promotes hepatic neutral lipid flux and nuclear pore complex assembly.” A terrific collaboration with @arrudalab.bsky.social, led by co–first authors Alyssa Mathiowetz and Emily Maymand.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Kelly Nguyen announced as Laureate in Life Sciences at the 2026 Blavatnik Awards in the UK.

Congratulations to @kellythd-nguyen.bsky.social, Group Leader in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, who has been named the Life Sciences Laureate at the 2026 Blavatnik Awards in the UK 🎉

Read the full news story here: mrclmb.ac.uk/news-events/...

#LMBNews #Blavatnik2026

In any other sector this would be front page news along with government funding announcements.

The UK just seems to not value higher education.

Screenshot of LinkedIn post from ARC saying that DP27 EOI outcomes will be released on RMS on the 26th Feb 2026.

The ARC have said (on LinkedIn) they will release outcomes for Discovery Projects Expressions of Interest (2027) tomorrow👇

📣 Excited to co-organize this @embo.org Lecture Course - #AI driven approaches in structural biology 📅 26 April - 2 May 2026 in Bengalore (India). More info and registration below @pasteur.fr @cnrsbiologie.bsky.social meetings.embo.org/event/26-ai-...

Senior Scientist, Protein Sciences in South San Francisco, California, United States of America | Research & Development at Genentech Apply for Senior Scientist, Protein Sciences job with Genentech in South San Francisco, California, United States of America. Research & Development at Genentech

Our department at Genentech is hiring. We're looking for a freshly-minted PhD (0-3 years) protein biochemist / structural biologist to join as a Sr Scientist. A rare opportunity to join our group leader job family at a more junior level than we usually hire.

Grant timeline delays ‘inevitable’ given security rules, ARC says - Research Professional News Australian Research Council tells Senate of foreign interference issues and restructuring plans

"Unfortunate but inevitable" 😜

More on the completely unworkable grant time-frames ARC recently introduced (up to 16 months!) & the 'oh well, maybe it'll improve?' responses provided by ARC reps in Senate Estimates.

By @jsresearchpro.bsky.social for @resprofnews.bsky.social. No paywall.

One week left to apply for the protein crystallography focused 2.5 year postdoc position in my group @otagobiochemist.bsky.social :
otago.taleo.net/careersectio...

Since last year, I've been making a RELION GUI that supports viewing, navigating and running jobs in a way completely compatible with the original RELION pipeline. Now it's working nicely for both SPA and tomography! Please try it out - github.com/hanjinliu/hi...

The Burmeister Lab: Studying Microbial Evolution and Extinction ​Our research integrates evolutionary biology and microbiology, using bacteria and phage as study systems to address fundamental questions in both fields. ​ ​We study microbial evolution, a...

Alita Burmeister (@aburmeister.bsky.social) is looking to hire a postdoc (or potentially a PhD student) for projects on phage resistance and evolution. The position description is posted to the Eco-Evo Jobs wiki and also available on her lab's website (arburmeister.weebly.com).

Home from a great #EMBO workshop in Barcelona. Intracellular mechanics & organelle Mechanobiology was such a fun topic! @christanny.bsky.social made sure I didn’t get lost. It was great to catch up with @katemiro.bsky.social 1st time in almost 10yrs!!. Thank you to the hosts.. (continued) 1/2

Seen on FB: The Asylum / Larry Borg

This is an interesting article for those beginning down the cryoEM route for structure determination from the perspective of a crystallography lab. Not giving up on crystallography yet 😜 but I honestly can't think of a single crystallography lab now that isn't also using CryoEM in some capacity.

Already more than 5,000 Australians have joined our campaign to release more funding for medical research in the 2026 Federal Budget.

If you can spare 30 seconds of your time to join our campaign, you’ll help fund life-saving cures in Australia.
www.moniqueryan.com.au/medical_rese...

The inaugural Sir Gustav Nossal Professor of Immunology, Professor Laura Mackay.

We’re proud to welcome Prof Laura Mackay as our first Sir Gustav Nossal Professor of Immunology – advancing Sir Gus’ remarkable legacy, thanks to the generosity and vision of the Nossal family.

More: www.wehi.edu.au/news/world-r...

Finally out in @nature.com: a new piece of the puzzle of how complex life evolved. Lead by @archaeal.bsky.social & @katyappler.bsky.social. Great collab with @greening.bsky.social and @kassipan.bsky.social. More pieces to follow soon! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This local Wolfdog joined an Olympic ski event and triggered the finish-line camera. This is Nazgul. He snuck into a cross-country skiing sprint this morning and raced the homestretch with some competitors before being escorted home. 14/10 someone get him a medal

Eukaryogenesis in light of an expanded catalogue of Asgard genomes. a, Simplified, scaled timeline spanning from before the Last Asgard archaea Common Ancestor (LAsCA) to today. Thin bands mark predicted time ranges of relevant events (for example, GOE), thicker bands represent processes (for example, eukaryogenesis), and brackets indicate the period shown in b. The timeline further highlights milestones, including potential early eukaryotic fossils60 and the modern-day co-occurrence of Heimdallarchaeia and Alphaproteobacteria observed in this study (interaction likely originated earlier).

Fig. 1 | Expanded genomic diversity of Asgard archaea. a, Maximum-likelihood phylogeny based on 47 non-ribosomal markers (NM47)using the WAG + C10 + R4 model with 100 nonparametric bootstrap pseudoreplicates, including 869 Asgardarchaeota MAGs and 309 outgroup genomes. The blue branches (lower right) indicate the new Asgardarchaeota classes, Ranarchaeia, and the recently proposed Asgardarchaeia4. The concentric rings denote (in to out): the predicted genome size, metabolic guilds based on Pfam clustering, sampling locations, and black stars on the outside mark MAGs added by this study. Asgard, Asgardarchaeia; Atabey, Atabeyarchaeia; Baldr, Baldrarchaeia; Frey/Jord, Frey/Jordarchaeia; Gerd, Gerdarchaeales; Heimdall, Heimdallarchaeaceae; Hel, Helarchaeales; Hermod, Hermodarchaeia; Hod, Hodarchaeales; Kari, Kariarchaeaceae; Loki, Lokiarchaeales; Njord, Njordarchaeales; Odin, Odinarchaeia; Ran, Ranarchaeia; Sif, Sifarchaeia; Thor, Thorarchaeia; Wukong, Wukongarchaeia. b, SR4-recoded phylogeny of the same genome set inferred with the model GTR + C60 + G and 100 nonparametric bootstrap pseudoreplicates (Methods). This updated catalogue constitutes a large increase in the medium- to high-quality publicly available genomes (completeness >50% and contamination and redundancy <10%) with 65.3% from the Guaymas Basin and 34.7% from the Bohai Sea. The encircled numbers represent MAGS added by this study. The scale bars in bothsubpanels represent the average number of substitutions per site.Map created in BioRender; Appler, K. https://biorender.com/147ieoc(2025).

Our work is published today: ‘Oxygen metabolism in descendants of the archaeal-eukaryotic ancestor’. This was a huge effort lead by @katyappler.bsky.social. Extremely grateful to have been a part of this amazing project! 😊🦠🧬

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