sarahejbowman

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

My HPLC was definitely overlooked

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

This is incredibly beautiful, and the fact that the resolution is sufficient to follow the path of DNA spooling inside the virion head and through the tail is amazing

👏🏻 Alec Follmer, Emily Scott, Ritimukta Sarangi, Romila Mascarenhas, M. Jake Pushie, Wei-Chen Chang, @rajnandani.bsky.social, Roseanne Sension, Ilme Schlichting, @lbackman.bsky.social, Flora Meilleur, Sandra Mous, Macon Abernathy 👏🏻

Thanks to the amazing speakers & panelists for making the 8th iteration of the ⚡️Metals in Structural Biology Workshop⚡such an engaging part of the User Meeting!

Calgary Cal, IUCr 2026 mascot, at SLAC for SSRL LCLS User Meeting - attended the Metals in Structural Biology workshop

Group photo from user meeting

Last week the SSRL/LCLS Annual User Meeting at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory had a record turnout for a week of workshops, talks, posters, networking, and 🔥 science! 🧪 💎 🔬💡

Meeting attended by Calgary Cal 🐴
#WhereIsCal
#IUCr2026

🚨💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎💎🚨
Reservation deadline for the October 2025 high-throughput crystallization screen at the National Crystallization Center is today Friday October 3!
www.getacrystal.org

View from a square looking down a city street. There are apartments on each side. The buildings are white stone. A red tile pixel art space invader with googly eyes looks down from a wall.

👀

Calgary Cal at O’Hare airport

Stay tuned - Calgary Cal and I got delayed at O’Hare but we are in route to the SSRL/LCLS User Meeting! ✈️🧪🔬💎
#WhereIsCal #IUCr2026

Scientist holding a painting by David Goodsell

Fun Friday update from the lab - Chris Campomizzi won a David Goodsell print for filling the @acastructuralsci.bsky.social Annual Meeting survey! How cool is that!!
💎🎨✅

A host organelle integrates stolen chloroplasts for animal photosynthesis Sea slugs steal foreign chloroplasts and store them in specialized organelles that facilitate photosynthesis and eventual digestion to mediate starvation resistance.

www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

A host organelle (in sea slugs) integrates stolen chloroplasts for animal photosynthesis

A huge shoutout to all the dedicated grants management specialists at the NIH who are working around the clock to push grants out before the Sep 30 deadline. And also to the POs responding to frantic emails.
Not an easy job under the best of circumstances and right now it's the pits.
Thank you!

Seconded. For those of us watching closely, it's a massive and impressive effort in the face of strong headwinds.

This one is a bit of a departure from the usual and definitely a work in progress!

We found that by using ab initio reconstruction at very high res, in very small steps, we could crack some small structures that had eluded us - e.g. 39kDa iPKAc (EMPIAR-10252), below.

Read on for details... 1/x

Really incredible effort by the indefatigable @nurseteria.bsky.social to raise awareness of what we are going to bring back by stripping access to vaccination 👇🏻

Dear scientific community,

I am looking for two postdoctoral structural biologists to join my group at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford.

my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

🚨 registration deadline today 9/8! 🚨

Willing to join us @pasteur.fr for a PhD for a project on how interactions between mobile genetic elements shape bacterial adaptation? Subject to be tailored to candidates with keen interest in evolution, genomics, computational biology, microbiology. Check www.pasteur.fr/en/education...

Exciting news 🎉! Notice of Award from NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) for a new instrument in the National Crystallization Center! Stay tuned for more details... hint: 🦟 🤖
@getacrystal.bsky.social

Food Trucks for lunch!

Poster Session: Thurs Sept 25
 
Facility Tours: Tours of SSRL and LCLS facilities
 
NEW Outreach Initiative – Student Discovery Pass: web.cvent.com/event/460e7d...

Other amazing sessions during the week include:
⚡️LCLS-II HE: Sample Environment and Delivery
⚡️LCLS Data Analysis Workshop
⚡️Using DIALS at Synchrotrons and XFELs
⚡️Serial Crystallography Workshop
⚡️Computational Methods
⚡️The Evolving Role of Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) in Structural Biology

⚡️Metals in Structural Biology Workshop⚡️
Speakers: Alec Follmer, Emily Scott, Ritimukta Sarangi, Romila Mascarenhas, M. Jake Pushie, Wei-Chen Chang, Rajnandani Kashyap, Ph.D, Kyle Lancaster, Ilme Schlichting
Panelists: Lindsey R. F. Backman, PhD, Flora Meilleur, Sandra Mous, Jocelyn Richardson

SSRL/LCLS User Meeting at SLAC is scheduled from September 21-26, 2025.

Excited that the 8th iteration of Metals in Structural Biology Workshop is on Tues 9/23 (organized by Jennifer Bridwell-Rabb & myself).

🚨⏰
Registration deadline is Monday Sept 8: web.cvent.com/event/460e7d...

I’ll be taking Calgary Cal with me to conferences, meetings & data collection trips until #IUCr2026!!

#WhereIsCal 🐴🗺️ ✈️🚞🚙

My quote of the day

Nobody ever thanks you for saving them from the disease they didn't know they were going to get.

William Foege

The HeXI hutch being assembled on the experimental hall at Diamond.

Great to see HeXI starting to appear on the experimental hall at @diamondlightsource.bsky.social. HeXI will be a 1 MeV electron diffraction instrument that will complement complement the capabilities of VMXm.

Cool story on the re-purposing of a protein I worked on in graduate school! Curious about other work that led to this?

See:

tinyurl.com/56mybjmd
tinyurl.com/ksmau4xm
tinyurl.com/yw9av9yh
tinyurl.com/yuujhajc
tinyurl.com/5987f53r

Way to go Burstyn Group alumni!! And check out: tinyurl.com/mvvpzj3f

Good news! KU's IRACDA program was reinstated! We are now taking applications for postdocs. Please spread the word.

sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Sear...

BIG NEWS!! We will be hiring a new professor with 25 years of endowed funding at the @biozentrum.unibas.ch @unibas.ch, focused on using biophysics and structural biology to explore climate-related fundamental science topics. Come start an innovative research cluster with us! 🧪🔬🧶🧬🌾🌍

A stack of books from bottom to top: THE CHEMISTRY BOOK by Derek Lowe EYE OF THE BEHOLDER by Snyder NUTS AND BOLTS by Roma Agrawal THE DISORDERED COSMOS by Chanda Prescott’s-Weinstein HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES COSMOS THE GLASS UNIVERSE WHY DONT THINGS FALL UP? LIQUID RULES LONGITUDE THE GENE THE INVISIBLE KILLER A IS FOR ARSENIC

I'm working on double checking citations for my book right now.

Here is a stack of a few of the books that I read to write my narrative nonfiction book on spectroscopy:

Of course it was 😂