Olivier Duss

Anthony A. Hyman will become EMBL’s next Director General.

He joins EMBL from @mpi-cbg.de in Dresden. He is also Professor of Molecular Biology @tudresden.bsky.social, and was a group leader at EMBL Heidelberg from 1993 to 1999.

www.embl.org/news/people-...

Registration is open for "The complex life of #RNA" 2026 @embl.org in Heidelberg!

Excellent invited speakers and 30 short talks and even more flash talks selected from the abstracts!

Thanks a lot Elise!

The story of how multiple RBPs cooperate to repress translation is now out in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social by @marcopayr.bsky.social and in a great collaboration with @hennig-lab.bsky.social!

www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Thinking like a Scientist: The Limits of Genome Editing and Omics Second part of Thinking like a Scientist, reflecting on how genome editing and multi-omics, while powerful, can introduce conceptual flaws that distort our understanding of gene function and biologica...

Thinking Like a Scientist, Part Two: The Omics Illusion network.febs.org/posts/thinki... #FEBSnet

Excited to share my first PhD student’s @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social!

Tracking 5 dyes simultaneously Kavan Gor @embl.org tracks nascent #RNA folding during #ribosome assembly to correlate structural with functional information on single RNA molecules!

Check it out!

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

Travel’s got me wiped, but catching up with @colindascheele.bsky.social, @pierresantucci.bsky.social & @olivierduss.bsky.social at #FEBS2025 made it totally worth it. Huge thanks to Pelin Telkoparan and Dilek Cevik for the wonderful hospitality—what a time in Istanbul!

Molecular basis of influenza ribonucleoprotein complex assembly and processive RNA synthesis Influenza viruses replicate and transcribe their genome in the context of a conserved ribonucleoprotein (RNP) complex. By integrating cryo–electron microscopy single-particle analysis and cryo–electro...

Excited to share our new @science.org paper! Led by postdocs Ruchao Peng and Xin Xu, we used cryo-EM/ET to reveal the influenza ribonucleoprotein complex structure and its strand-sliding mechanism for RNA synthesis, paving the way for new antivirals.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Single-molecule multimodal timing of in vivo mRNA synthesis mRNA synthesis requires extensive pre-mRNA maturation, the organisation of which remains unclear. Here, we directly sequence pre-mRNA without metabolic labelling or amplification to resolve transcript...

The timeline of co-transcriptional #mRNA processing and #modification may have to be revised: cleavage, termination, and #m6A deposition may occur earlier than most #splicing! Potential textbook changing study in bioRxiv by edueyras.bsky.social & Rippei Hayashi labs!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Novel color via stimulation of individual photoreceptors at population scale Image display by cell-by-cell retina stimulation, enabling colors impossible to see under natural viewing.

Five people have seen a color never before visible to the naked human eye, thanks to a new retinal stimulation technique called Oz.

Learn more in #ScienceAdvances: scim.ag/442Hjn6

Thanks a lot for hosting me! Was very cool to talk to all of you!

Check out our preprint at BioRxiv revealing mechanisms of mRNP assembly during translation repression: (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...). Great collaboration with Olivier Duss (@olivierduss.bsky.social). Great Work Marco Payr (@marcopayr.bsky.social) and thanks for the video, explaining our paper.

Ever wondered how several individual RBPs cooperate to repress translation?

Lead by @marcopayr.bsky.social and in great collaboration with @hennig-lab.bsky.social, we simultaneously tracked the binding of several proteins to single mRNA molecules in real-time!

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

Snapshot of in-cell protein contact sites reveals new host factors and hijacking of paraspeckles during influenza A virus infection Influenza A virus (IAV) exploits the host cellular machinery to facilitate its replication, yet many host-IAV interactions remain unexplored in the cellular context. Detailed information about interac...

Great work led by our PhD student Iuliia Kotova in collaboration with Fan Liu @fan-liu.bsky.social, Boris Bogdanow, Lars Mühlberg, and Olivier Duss @olivierduss.bsky.social and Guelsah Gabriel labs. Structural analysis by our PhD student Konstantin Gilep.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A subcellular map of translational machinery composition and regulation at the single-molecule level Millions of ribosomes are packed within mammalian cells, yet we lack tools to visualize them in toto and characterize their subcellular composition. In this study, we present ribosome expansion micros...

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

Tour de force by Barna Lab

The RNA helicase HrpA rescues collided ribosomes in E. coli Antibiotics that inhibit ribosomes lead to collisions on mRNAs when upstream ribosomes catch up with stalled ones. Campbell et al. show that the HrpA protein in E. coli senses ribosome collisions and removes the stalled ribosome, helping cells survive in…

The RNA helicase HrpA rescues collided ribosomes in E. coli

Thanks Mark for the nice summary!

Title, authors and abstract from link

In a remarkable new paper, Qureshi and Duss use multi-colour single-molecule fluorescence microscopy to directly and simultaneously track transcription, translation & coupling 3/n
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Structural biology of RNA and protein‐RNA complexes after AlphaFold3 Recent breakthroughs in AI-mediated protein structure prediction have significantly accelerated research and generated valuable hypotheses within the field of structural biology and beyond. Notably, ...

Just published: My (Janosch Hennig) view on the current capabilities of AF3 and similar for RNA and protein-RNA complex structure prediction plus a bit of forward looking: doi.org/10.1002/cbic...

Graphic showing modification of mRNA with ADP-ribose mediated by bacterial enzyme cmdTAC

Check it out! Another novel RNA modification - ADP-ribosylation - that was previously only known on proteins. A cousin to #glycoRNA 👏

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

#cryoET of Mycoplasma pneumoniae Chloramphenicol-bound ribosomes at a global 3.0 Å resolution

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

Structural and kinetic insights into tRNA promoter engagement by yeast general transcription factor TFIIIC Abstract. Transcription of transfer RNA (tRNA) genes by RNA polymerase (Pol) III requires the general transcription factor IIIC (TFIIIC), which recognizes

Excited to share our new work on the earliest steps of Pol-III transcription: We provide structural and kinetic insights into tRNA promoter engagement by yeast transcription factor TFIIIC !

Cool collaboration with the Müller and Eustermann Labs @embl.org !

academic.oup.com/nar/advance-...

Thanks!

Thanks Arnaud!

Thanks Wolfgang!

Thanks!

Good to hear!

Thanks!

Thanks Tom!

Thanks David!