Max Haase

Prizes must recognize machine contributions to discovery The future of science will be written by humans and machines together. Awards should reflect that reality.

Men will really come up with every stupid reason not to recognize their women colleagues’ contributions.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A vast 4,000-year-old spatial pattern of termite mounds Martin et al. show that in Northeast Brazil an estimated 200 million, regularly spaced, termite mounds are up to 4000 years old. Each mound is 2-4m high by 9 m in diameter; they occupy 230,000 km2, an...

Apparently termites have spent the past few millennia secretly building the "equivalent to ∼4000 great pyramids of Giza" in Brazil.

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Repeated losses of self-fertility shaped heterozygosity and polyploidy in yeast evolution Evolutionary transitions in mating strategy have profound consequences for genetic variation and adaptation. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, mating-type switching is a central feature of the life cycle t...

New preprint from the lab: we show that the ability to switch mating type was lost at least 13 times independently in the evolution of S. cerevisiae. At least 27% of isolates are heterothallic with a strong association with polyploidy and heterozygosity
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The BUB1 and BUBR1 paralogs scaffold the kinetochore fibrous corona The kinetochore fibrous corona docks on CENP-E and a second elusive receptor identified as the checkpoint protein BUB1.

The BUB1 and BUBR1 paralogs scaffold the kinetochore fibrous corona | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Congratulations @vcmentowski.bsky.social for solving a remarkably challenging molecular puzzle

Twitter is a hell hole of bots talking to bots. I wouldn't buy to much into the hate and misinformation there. It's just become a far-right hyper-reality, sucks when it start oozing into reality tho

Or more likely, acknowledgement of classic reality would cause him to be kicked out of their delusional reality party.

He’s bought into the hyperreality of the mannosphere right, he cannot acknowledge facts of classic reality as that would crumble the pillars holding up their collective delusions

One may argue unicellular life still rules the earth. Us multicellular forms are just really big and especially self-absorbed

People who upload preprints without the supplemental materials should go straight to jail

Centromeres in budding yeasts are conserved in chromosomal location but not in structure. The budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae has ‘point’ centromeres, which are much smaller and simpler than centromeres of most other eukaryotes and have a defined DNA sequence. Other yeast taxa have ...

New preprint from lab adding to recent interest in yeast centromeres. There are dramatic changes in structure, but location is conserved www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Wonderful work! I am looking forward to reading it in more depth after my holiday.

Molecular requirements for PLK1 activation by T-loop phosphorylation Activation of PLK1, a master mitotic kinase, requires phosphorylation of its activation segment on Thr210, within a basic consensus sequence for Aurora kinases. Aurora B-dependent phosphorylation of T...

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

I think it shouldn’t have been retracted. Like you say, most interpretations in papers will later be shown to so-so or plain wrong. So are we to retract papers for these reasons. Seems absurd. I think it’s good to assume good faith of the authors.

Thanks Benjamin, I also very much enjoyed your epic on yeast metabolic structural evo!

Carl Sagan too fails his own standards, he did huge damage to the public’s understanding of history with his nonsense cosmos episode on Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria.

Condensin II activation by M18BP1 Condensin I and II promote the drastic spatial rearrangement of the human genome upon mitotic entry. While condensin II is known to initiate this proc…

Finally out! Check out our new work on how M18BP1, known so far to be important for the epigenetic maintenance of centromeres, supports chromosome condensation when the cell enters mitosis. We also uncover a regulatory ménage á trois between condensin II, M18BP1 and MCPH1.

Midea?

yes!

tantamount to scientific malpractice imo

NEW pub: The role of metabolism in shaping #enzyme structures over 400 million years. Now out in @nature.com

Super grateful to have played a small role in this project - congrats to lead/corr authors Oliver, Benjamin, and Markus!

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

#alphafold #evolution #genomics

We have an opening for postdoctoral training! Please apply by 15th August 2025 for full consideration. Here is the ad: hittinger.genetics.wisc.edu/People/Join/...

The role of metabolism in shaping enzyme structures over 400 million years - Nature By combining structural biology and evolutionary genomics analyses, the evolution of enzymes over 400 million years is shown to be governed by catalytic function, metabolic network architecture, cost ...

A paper I have been working on with Oliver Lemke in the Ralser lab has just come out: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We used predicted structures to gain insight into the evolution of metabolic proteins in yeast.

A bit more in this linked-in post (www.linkedin.com/posts/benjam...).

Congrats! I am looking forward to hearing about this work in Paris!

This is a good time to remember that Moas, Emus, and the other ratites diverged so long ago, they FLEW to different continents, and then lost the ability to fly and became giants independently. You can't just sprinkle a few variants to make one into the other.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Oh sorry I didn’t see that :(

FYI the USDA culture collection has this species and many more. They will send it to you for free (typically) just need to provide a shipping label.
nrrl.ncaur.usda.gov

Although I do admit it’s quite cumbersome currently with how many species generic names have changed.

Im all for any name changes that help move towards making Candida a monophyletic clade

New favorite worst graphical abstract just dropped.

I don’t have a good answer to that, but much of those local economies depend on tourism. So I’m not sure how to balance those levers.