Keri Backus

Profiling the proteome-wide selectivity of diverse electrophiles - Nature Chemistry Covalent inhibitors are powerful entities in drug discovery. Now the amino acid selectivity and reactivity of a diverse electrophile library have been assessed proteome-wide using an unbiased workflow...

How can we study target engagement and selectivity of covalent inhibitors? Which electrophilic probes are best suited to study a certain amino acid?

Our study on "Profiling the proteome-wide selectivity of diverse electrophiles" is published in Nature Chemistry.(1/7)

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

Real-time API control of mass specs has been hard to get started (C#, VS, etc). Mike Hoopmann's recent work makes dev easier & more open!:

Nova - lightweight dev library
schweppelab.github.io/Nova/ pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Helios - a unified instrument API now @ JPR
github.com/SchweppeLab/...

Congratulations to my great friend and colleague @bradylabupenn.bsky.social for this well deserved award!
@pennmedcso.bsky.social @penncancer.bsky.social

🚨 Save the date! 🚨
2nd LA Mass Spec Day:
Oct 17, 2025 @ UCLA South Bay 🎉
Talks, posters, networking + plenaries by Jennifer Van Eyk & Melissa Hoffman!

Register 👉 forms.gle/e6A9XWxiRF6K...

Submit abstracts 👉 forms.gle/RCf5v3Gab5V8...

More info to follow soon

About 800 NIH, NSF research grants suspended following UCLA federal funding cuts - Daily Bruin About 800 research grants have been suspended at UCLA, according to a Friday email from Vice Chancellor for Research and Creative Activities Roger Wakimoto. Wakimoto said in the email, which was sent ...

Daily Bruin article about the ~800 frozen grants at UCLA including some from my lab dailybruin.com/2025/08/02/a...

Trump freezes $200 million in UCLA science and medical research funding, citing antisemitism The Trump administration has frozen roughly $200 million in National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and other federal agency-funded research at UCLA, citing allegations the school d...

Suspension of all grants to UCLA www.latimes.com/california/s...

Consider signing the letter to support NIH and the "Bethesda Declaration" (www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...) #ASMS2025 @asms.org

ASSIGNMENT: COMMENT ON SCHEDULE F

1 week left to comment about Schedule F, potentially making NIH institute and center director essentially political appointees.

www.regulations.gov/commenton/OP...

1/n

Join @lindsaykpino.com, me, and our amazing panelists for the #ASMS2025 #Chemoproteomics workshop on Monday!

And after a brief interlude of recommending CSY1 and all the MIRA study sections, now ART recommendations are back to normal

Anyone else notice that ART is now giving different study section assignments compared to earlier in the week? Same title and abstract last night and today, different strong and possible matches...?

We will be hosting the 2025 ONO Pharma Foundation Annual Symposium on June 23 at the Royal Sonesta Boston. This event offers an opportunity to explore the latest breakthroughs presented by ONO INITIATIVE awardees and to discuss groundbreaking science in chemical biology. (1/2)

New paper from our lab joint with Val Arboleda @val-arboleda.bsky.social

The 13th General Meeting of the International Proteolysis Society will be held in Búsios, Brazil Oct 26-30, 2025. Training workshops will be held at the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz Oct 23-23. Register now! Links below.

1/3

The fantastically successful NIGMS MIRA R35 "expired" on May 17, after the most recent deadline--these removals are the most aggressive attack on American science in the current series of devastating actions 🧪

Excited to see this out in @science.org today!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Great news: NIH postbac program is recruiting again! If your grad school plans were affected by program cutbacks or admissions freezes this year I highly encourage you to apply, this could be a perfect opportunity. Please repost.

www.training.nih.gov/research-tra...

Congrats to all the award winners and especially to Backus Lab PhD student Flowreen Shikwana and undergrad Joelle Darrouj!

U of Michigan @umich.edu set aside funds from central to support researchers with unexpected disruption in federal funding for up to 6 months.

Are any other institutions doing this? Seems like a good move.

#Medsky #NIH #federalfunding #researchfunding 🧪

record.umich.edu/articles/uni...

a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on ALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on

Bluetorial: Women, courage, and leadership

What follows will include some generalizations based on population averages of what I have experienced over the course of my career. There are, of course, exceptions in every group who are substantially more to one extreme or the other.

One of the most significant and challenging projects of my career so far. PepCentric: a scalable computational platform utilizing novel 2-D fragment indexing for rapid peptide-centric searches, enabling proteogenomics searches against billions of spectra in seconds. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Extending my grant update this morning. Here are data limited to new and competitive renewal applications.

The Pause is dead, Long live the Pause...

📢 Postdoc Opening – Metabolism & Cancer! 📢
Looking for a motivated postdoc to explore how metabolism regulates tumor initiation at Roswell Park in Buffalo, NY! Join us to tackle big questions with cool science in a collaborative environment.
Interested? DM me! #PostdocJobs #CancerMetabolism

@standupforscience.bsky.social Los Angeles 3/7 noon at the Federal building docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

🚨 Chemical Biology & Probes study section (formerly SBCB, one of two NIH panels that reviews chemistry #chemsky 🧪) was abruptly POSTPONED w/no specific plans for rescheduling, less than 24h before start.

If this affects you call your reps & senators, talk to local news, make your voice heard 📢 👩‍🔬

Today in @nature.com we share our back-to-back stories with Ning Zheng’s lab revealing chemical-genetic convergence between a molecular glue degrader & E3 ligase cancer mutations. 1/5

Stand Up And Be Counted

Biopharma companies and CEOs are keeping their heads down at their own peril. They should speak up about what’s happening to the NIH and other science agencies before it’s too late.

Silence gives consent. And no one should consent to this.

8 years ago @asbmb.bsky.social gave me +18 more trainees a crash course in advocacy for their DC Hill Day. With NIH slashing indirect costs effective immediately, university Govt Affairs teams will be swamped. Here's 10 tips for scientists contacting lawmakers +pics from Denver's 2017 Science March.

What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF

A long post about what’s happening to the science funding agencies in the US and why. As mentioned, this one just kept getting longer even as I kept stripping curse words from it.

www.science.org/content/blog...

Would love to hear if anyone has personally taken part to a study section meeting yet since this started. I know that we are told that all is moving on as usual, but is it?