Colin Jackson

Great initiative, I hate checking twitter but still seems to feed more interesting papers…

Crystal structure of malaria parasite fusogen PfHAP2 domain 3 and nanobodies - unsolved mysteries galore! 🦟🦙💎

PfHAP2 is part of family of ancient fusogens involved in fertilisation processes in algae, plants to malaria parasites.

Check out the first crystal structure of PfHAP2 D3 and nanobodies

Beginning 2026 with a flipping good paper🚀 OSCA/TMEM63 proteins do double duty: they’re ion channels and mechanically activated lipid scramblases helping reshape membranes and survive mechanical stress. 👏 @yiechanglin.bsky.social @charlesdcox.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Pfs48/45 nanobodies block Plasmodium falciparum transmission Author summary Malaria is spread when an infected Anopheles mosquito bites a human. Within the female Anopheles mosquito, malaria parasite fertilisation occurs in the mosquito midgut. If you inhibit p...

Pfs48/45 nanobodies block malaria parasite transmission 🦟 and crystal structures provide structural insight to how they bind 💎

Pfs48/45 is one of the leading transmission blocking vaccine candidates and a critical fertilisation antigen 💕

Please share widely- love to hear your feedback!

🧵1/3 I created this free 37-hour course, distributed across 10 lectures, to introduce AI-based protein design. For more information about the course and its specific topics, please visit the official course page:

New Preprint!! We show that binding entropy can be quantitatively predicted from crystallographic ensemble models, accounting for both protein conformational entropy and solvent entropy! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Project started by Jack and led by Sacha

Protein design still mostly targets single compact domains; but bio builds function by recombining domains into larger multi domain proteins. Understanding the evolutionary rules of domain assembly will be important if we want to design the level of functionality seen in many native proteins

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... most proteins are multi domain but our understanding of how architectures evolve is limited - we mapped 40K chitinases and show a stepwise “grammar” of domain gain/loss and localisation changes that predicts ecological strategy and physiological function.

I'm really excited to break up the holiday relaxation time with a new preprint that benchmarks AlphaFold3 (AF3)/“co-folding” methods with 2 new stringent performance tests.

Thread below - but first some links:
A longer take:
fraserlab.com/2025/12/29/k...

Preprint:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

My uni and many others have tried to centralize and automate many administrative functions. What happens is that the expertise is moved out of the department and then the rest of us suckers are left to learn to become admins and deal with all the edge cases. Such has been the last 6 yrs of my life

alpseq: an open-source workflow to turbocharge nanobody discovery with high-throughput sequencing Nanobodies have emerged as promising tools for many biotechnological applications due to their small size, high stability, and remarkable binding specificity. Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) enables ...

Keen to use an open source workflow for nanobody discovery? Check out Alpseq 🦙

Alpseq’s diversity analysis, enrichment counts & clustering allow different approaches for nanobody selection

Great collab with bioinformaticians @qgouil.bsky.social Kathleen Zeglinski

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Pigeon fortress

Pomfret Vermont
📸 Ngoc Minh

At the age of just six years old, H.M. Saffer II exhibited his art at a public show, launching his career into a creative world where he continues to thrive. Following his graduation from Temple University in Pennsylvania, he moved to Paris, France, to study economics. Concurrently, he honed his musical talents performing with renowned French stars Hugues Avery, Jacques Brell, Charles Aznavour, and others. While in Paris, he was chef and owner of two restaurants, and later a third in Madrid. Throughout all of these endeavors, Saffer never stopped painting, and exhibited in Paris as well as Brussels, Belgium. His career as a musician continued as he worked with Warner Brothers, creating music while exhibiting his works in the company's lobby. Following his time there, Saffer went on to work for the Crewe Group, then created his own company, HMS Two Music LTD, creating for global brands such as Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Ford Motor Company, and Michelob, among others. As the years passed, Saffer's art was progressed and refined, while broadening in scope. Beginning in 1981, he studied with the Japanese masters of the traditional brush painting technique, sumi-e, meeting his wife there in 1983. He was represented by Galerie Musee and the Artbridge Gallery in Japan, and by Alisen Gallery and the Kwai Fung Hin Gallery in Hong Kong. Here, he exhibited as a resident and solo artist. After relocating again to upstate New York, Saffer explored methods combining his Eastern and Western artistic influences, creating a unique style on his journey towards interpersonal visual expression. Saffer has instructed at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Berkshire Community College, and Columbia-Greene Community College. He currently has gallery representation both in the United States and internationally.

H.M. Saffer II (American, b.1942) :
Moon Waters, 2023

Oil on canvas
30 × 30 in | 76.2 × 76.2 cm

Further description & bio in the alt text 👇

Protein evolution as a complex system - Nature Chemical Biology Viewing protein evolution through the lens of complex systems theory may offer new insights into the principles driving biological adaptation. In this Comment we explore how characteristics such as se...

‘Protein evolution as a complex system’ – A new Comment discusses protein evolution in terms of complex systems theory and machine learning approaches to model the dynamics of protein evolution

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

Thank you everyone for the congratulations and the large number of applications! I want to specifically encourage applications for these positions:
* Postdoc in structural biology (cryoEM, ideally with X-ray too)
* Full time lab manager/technician with wetlab experience

Protein-ligand complexes are all the rage with OpenBind+other efforts launching

3 amazing papers describing 229 protein-ligand structures just dropped in @actacrystd.iucr.org

A tremendous teaching text, but I disagree on the discussed potential for misuse. Read more

fraserlab.com/2025/07/29/E...

Very excited about our latest all-atom generative model proteina, check out the project page (research.nvidia.com/labs/genair/...) and stay tuned for the code release soon!

nothing would make me happier than US science returning to the amazing and transformational legacy of success and dominance

but if that's not possible, we need other places with the vision to take over as the pacesetter

humanity's long term success demands no less

Pleased to announce I have been promoted to the rank of GRANDMASTER thank you for your attention to this matter

Cryo-EM structure of human telomerase dimer reveals H/ACA RNP-mediated dimerization Telomerase ribonucleoprotein (RNP) synthesizes telomeric repeats at chromosome ends using a telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) and a telomerase RNA (hTR in humans). Previous structural work showe...

Proud to share our work where we resolved a longstanding question regarding the existence of a human telomerase dimer and provided insights into its function. Led by 3 amazing lab members in collaboration with @yiliangding.bsky.social and @rdaslab.bsky.social.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This paper started probably 20 years ago when I was working with John Oakeshott, a long time in the making and I think a nice summary of a complex real world evolutionary process

Seriously.

Pay for review, not publication
Publish public reviews
Editorial assessment changes until version of record
Flexible article types elife-rp.msubmit.net/html/elife-r...

Some work todo on reviewer credit (add @prereview.bsky.social to you cv!)

High-performance genetically-encoded green and red fluorescent biosensors for pyruvate Pyruvate is the end-product of glycolysis and a central metabolite involved in many biochemical pathways. However, a lack of high-performance (i.e., Δ F / F > 10) single fluorescent protein (FP)-base...

New tools! GreenPy and ApplePy are fluorescent biosensors for pyruvate with huge responses (20–40x in vitro) and a range of affinities (10s of μM to mM). These should be game changers for imaging of metabolism! Great work by Shosei Imai @sikmys.bsky.social and team 👏. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Average zero-shot mutation effect predictions across related sequences to reduce noise and improve accuracy.

@cwjpugh.bsky.social @paulinanunezv.bsky.social @jonnyfrazer.bsky.social Mafalda Dias

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Canberra has excellent sky