Pim Huis in 't Veld

Independent research fellowships leading to tenured positions at the John Innes Centre.

Repost = nice. Thank you very much!!!

I can’t quite put it into words yet, but something is happening, a kind of global singularity—a fusion of tech/media/news/government/employment which allows the global elite to push single agendas: “You WILL care about Charlie Kirk. You will NOT care about Palestine. You WILL fear cancel culture.”

DNA methylation influences human centromere positioning and function - Nature Genetics Genome-wide and targeted perturbation of DNA methylation at centromeres affects CENP-A positioning and centromere structure, resulting in aneuploidy and reduced cell viability.

#1 Centromeres are epigenetic loci defined by CENP-A, positioned in unmethylated DNA flanked by highly methylated regions. Our work, published in @natgenet.nature.com in collaboration with @naltemose.bsky.social investigates the role of DNAme at human centromeres www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exciting FULL PROFESSORSHIP at the Vienna BioCenter - Molecular Mechanisms of Disease Mechanisms: www.maxperutzlabs.ac.at/news/open-po... Come be our colleague!

Child mortality used to be 50%. As recently as 1950, 25% of children died globally. Now it’s 4% globally, and 0.3% in some rich countries. A large part of that is better public health and vaccines.

Republicans are trying to take us back to the past.

ourworldindata.org/child-mortal...

Supervisors and Projects

Please re-post: If you know (or are!) somebody who might fancy doing a PhD (Oct 2026 start) in my group @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social, working on chromatin evolution in prokaryotes (or other things we're interested in), please have a look at www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/supervisors-...

This will break you

old FPLC guide. interesting for the old FPLC models and the models using them looking very much 80s or 90s

old FPLC guide. interesting for the old FPLC models and the models using them looking very much 80s or 90s

OG FPLC - unexpected suprise hidden in a drawer

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

A photo of Anas Al-Sharif and his Al Jazeera colleague Mohammad Qrere in their press bullet proof vests looking at their phones. Both are reported killed. Photo credit to Motassem A Dalloul.

BREAKING: One of the most important and prominent reporters on the ground in Gaza has been Anas Al Sharif.

He - and several other Al Jazeera journalists - have just been assassinated by Israelis forces whilst in their press tent in central Gaza.

Speechless.

“Maybe the world won’t act, maybe the world won’t help us but there might be a motive to stop this war—every time I document a massacre or event or bombing, I think that maybe through this bombing or this image that the war could stop and this war would end...”

This is amongst the most impactful two minutes of broadcasting I’ve ever seen.

By Emma Murphy, International Editor, ITV News. #Gaza

From above everything looks grey or black. Smoke is seen rising from building ga at the top of the photo. In the foreground many buildings have collapsed entirely. Photo credit to Heidi Levine taken for the Washington Post.

Photo of the Day.

Israel threatened reprisals if the press filmed Gaza from above during airdrops.

This is why. A scene of destroyed & burnt out buildings in what is left of Gaza City, the pre-war home to 800,000 people.

Credit to Post photographer Heidi Levine who defied the ban & took this.

The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza Israel controls the flow of food into Gaza. It has calculated how many calories Palestinians need to stay alive. Its data shows only a fraction has been allowed in

This is the lowest form of humanity! Nothing justifies this and the response (!) of all the western and Islamic (!) countries: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

And another opportunity! Any postdocs looking forward to start your lab on a tenure track? Supportive environment, great core facilities and an outstanding PhD program.

Full Professorship in Molecular Mechanisms of Disease - Vienna BioCenter, Austria job with Max Perutz Labs, University of Vienna | 12841053 Join theMax Perutz Labs as Full Professor to unravel disease mechanisms—from metabolism and stress to RNA regulation, epigenetics, and immunity.

Exciting and rare opportunity to join the @maxperutzlabs.bsky.social and the @viennabiocenter.bsky.social as a Full Professor!
www.nature.com/naturecareer...

New preprint from the lab - the first paper made (almost) entirely here @qmul.bsky.social

We report how human outer kinetochore complexes Ndc80 and Ska form cooperative oligomers, that together stabilise microtubule ends against shortening.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Key results below: (1/7)

Photograph of King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, on either side of President Trump. At this historic meeting they are standing together in the DNA salon of the Dutch Royal Palace. Renovated in 2019, the walls behind them depict an artistic representation of Royal DNA sequences for a small selection of genes, including FOXP2, a gene implicated in speech and language development.

For various reasons, photos/videos of this meeting are doing the rounds on news & social media. But my eye is drawn to the background; this is the "DNA salon" installed in the Dutch Royal Palace in 2019, including art representing the sequence of FOXP2, a gene for which I have a certain fondness. 🧬🗣️

Great nod to the photography work of Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis - Nature Insights into the dogrose genome and centromeres explain their ability to achieve stable sexual reproduction.

1/7
I am very excited to announce our🌹NEW PAPER OUT IN 𝑁𝐴𝑇𝑈𝑅𝐸!🌹
𝐃𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐓𝐎 𝐒𝐔𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐕𝐄: Bimodal centromeres in pentaploid dogroses shed light on their unique meiosis
With the Ritz and Kovařík labs we show a potential role for centromeres on 𝘙𝘰𝘴𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘢 bizarre reproduction!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sounds very interesting! The link does not work

Spinger Nature Discovers MDPI – The Strain on Scientific Publishing Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro

New from The Strain Team:
🎊 Springer Nature Discovers MDPI 🎊

Springer Nature has spawned a copycat journal series called "Discover" mimicking #MDPI journal titles and citation behaviours. We even made a browser game to prove it (see 🔗).

Gross! 😀 1/n

#ResearchIntegrity #SciPub #AcademicSky

Briefly thought there were decades between writing the letter and publication

She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her (Gift Article) President Trump’s immigration crackdown ensnared Kseniia Petrova, a scientist who fled Russia after protesting its invasion of Ukraine. She fears arrest if she is deported there.

“I feel like something is happening generally in America…Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.” 🧪

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/s...

YouTube video by Johan Gibcus Rules of Engagement

Earnshaw, Goloborodko, Dekker & Mirny labs are excited to present our latest work, "Rules of engagement for condensins and cohesins guide mitotic chromosome formation" - now accepted!!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
A short clip describing the key results:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmvO...

Israel shatters Gaza ceasefire as more than 400 Palestinians killed in IDF strikes – Middle East crisis live Benjamin Netanyahu says attacks were carried out to ‘achieve war objectives’ as Hamas labels strikes a ‘blatant violation of humanitarian conventions’

The deafening silence allowing this to happen is a real shame for humanity. Have we completely lost our conscience? 😢 😢 😢 www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

IMBA is recruiting a Junior Group Leader! Are you interested in starting your own lab, pursuing curiosity-driven basic research in the life sciences? Apply now to our group leader position. The deadline is May 28. Link is below.

Linocut portrait of biochemist and medical researcher Maud Menten (1879-1960) with the Michalis-Menten equation in blue and a histology image in pinks and purples in the background.

Happy birthday to Canadian medical researcher & #biochemist Maud Menten (1879-1960). 🧪🐡👩🏼‍🔬 #histscj Not only was she an author of Michaelis-Menten equation for enzyme kinetics, she invented the azo-dye coupling for alkaline phosphatase, 1st example of enzyme histochemistry, still used in imaging of 🧵

YouTube video by Gregory Mullins Claude Malhuret, Senator of the French Republic, speaks the truth about what is happening in the US

Here with subtitles:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmDV...