Alana Cowell 🔬

Cryo-EM Facility Manager | King's College London

Hi all- we are searching for a new manager/operator to run and develop KCL's Cryo-EM Structural Discovery Facility: a JEOL cryoARM200 + k3 and sample preparation equipment. This 200kV set up recently achieved a 1.2 Å apoferritin! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/137165-...

SPIN90 modulates the architecture of lamellipodial actin in an ARPC5L dependent fashion. When stimulated by nucleation-promoting factors such as WAVE, the Arp2/3 complex generates branched actin networks. In contrast, when activated by SPIN90, the Arp2/3 complex generates linear actin fil...

SPIN90 and #YanCao strike again! First NPF to only activate a subset of Arp2/3 iso-complexes to regulate lamellipodial actin & protrusion efficiency. Great collaboration with @romet-jegou-lab.bsky.social #ManosMavrakis polarized fluorescence microscopy rocks 🤘💥🎉
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Icecream: High-Fidelity Equivariant Cryo-Electron Tomography Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) visualizes 3D cellular architecture in near-native states. Recent deep-learning methods (CryoCARE, IsoNet, DeepDeWedge, CryoLithe) improve denoising and artifact cor...

Our colleagues Vinith Kishore and Valentin Debarnot from the @ivandokmanic.bsky.social lab have come up with an amazing deep learning tool for denoising and filling the missing wedge in #cryoET data. I'm pleased to introduce Icecream🍧

Fascinating work from @tianyang22.bsky.social and Yan Cao who discovered that SPIN90 dimerises to nucleate bidirectional filaments! #Arp2/3 #cryoEM

The Dunn School PhD programme is live! 🎉

Two projects in our labs:
1) How the motor protein giant dynein-2 works
2) How signalling-essential membrane proteins get into cilia

Cryo-EM/ET, single mol & live-cell fluor microscopy, CRISPR-based genetic tools & more!

www.path.ox.ac.uk/study-with-u...

Install Coot on Linux | Flathub Macromolecular model builder

OMG the newest Coot is on Flathub! 🤩
I wish I had known earlier.

https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.pemsley.coot

#CryoEM

Sub-cellular chemical mapping in bacteria using correlated cryogenic electron and mass spectrometry imaging

Congrats Hannah Ochner and authors on this important paper! Strong collaboration with @kiranrpatil.bsky.social

www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
@mrclmb.bsky.social @wellcometrust.bsky.social

Oh no! Maybe I just got lucky then 😅

Relieved that kids go back to school today, the train to work is peaceful again!

Trouble imaging actin in ExM? Meet HAK-Actin, a probe for U-ExM, cryo-ExM & iU-ExM. Enables post-expansion labeling for max signal. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Soon at @spirochrome.com
Led by O.Mercey and @lreymond.bsky.social, in collab with @dudinlab.bsky.social and @marinelap.bsky.social

Was already using 3 degree increments but very useful benchmarking to determine how the chosen tilts affect the resulting data!

Very excited to announce that my first, first author paper, is now on BioRxiv! In this paper we unambiguously show #COPII coated vesicles in unperturbed human cells for the very first time!!

Make my day and check it out!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#Cryo-ET #TeamTomo #Cryo-CLEM ❄️🔬❄️🔬❄️🔬❄️🔬

Zyxin directly binds to chromosomal DNA and is linked with mitochondrial integrity and apoptosis Human zyxin is a key component of the focal adhesion complex, playing a role in mediating cell-cell adhesion and cytoskeletal dynamics. Moreover, zyxin shuttles between the cytoplasm and the nucleus, ...

Excited to share the latest collaborative work from our lab at @ulethbridge.ca! We show that zyxin directly interacts with nuclear DNA to regulate transcription of mitochondrial pseudogenes—highlighting a novel role for zyxin in mitochondrial function.
cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/...

Now with colour

I made a little doodle this weekend showing how I felt when I saw my first Titan Krios in person. That was quite a few years ago now, amazing how much has changed in the cryoEM field since then.

Vimentin intermediate filaments coordinate actin stress fibers and podosomes to determine the extracellular matrix degradation by macrophages Huang et al. demonstrate that the intermediate filaments protein vimentin orchestrates actin stress fibers and podosomes, thereby facilitating efficient extracellular matrix (ECM) degradation via inte...

Vimentin intermediate filaments coordinate actin stress fibers and podosomes to determine the extracellular matrix degradation by macrophages
www.cell.com/developmenta...

Are you looking for a postdoc?
I will be looking for 2-4 people after the summer to join the lab !!
Do not hesitate to reach out and disseminate !!

Hey #TeamTomo,
Ever been in need of a tutorial about the fundamentals of cryo-electron tomography? From preprocessing raw frames to high-res subtomogram averaging?
That's why @florentwaltz.bsky.social and I made this website!

tomoguide.github.io

Follow the thread 1 /🧵
#CryoET #CryoEM 🔬🧪

Still thinking about the presentations and discussions had at CCP-EM last week, such a fantastic meeting for the cryoEM community.

Managed to get a box of subpar hexAuFoils free, trying to think of something creative to make with dead grids 😅

Postdoc position in my lab: investigating how the microtubule motor protein dynein-2 works in cilia.

Here's dynein-2 at work translocating microtubules - how is this activity regulated? How does dynein-2 malfunction in disease?

Find out more and apply:
my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

GitHub - tomotools/tomotools: Scripts to make cryo-electron tomography a bit easier Scripts to make cryo-electron tomography a bit easier - tomotools/tomotools

New Title Alert: Tomotools- a tool that provides scripts for making cryo-electron tomography a bit easier.

Learn more here: buff.ly/Dz1LT1I

#SBGrid #Software #StructuralBiology

The @ccpem.bsky.social Spring Symposium starts today!
Watch the live stream at ukri.zoom.us/j/93883619401
Schedule can be found at tinyurl.com/wx238aya
Open-access Symposium Proceedings going back to 2016 can be found in @actacrystd.iucr.org at journals.iucr.org/d/services/c...

The electron cryo-microscope adapted for use at liquid nitrogen temperatures within its custom-made black box.

A colder frontier in cryo-EM 🧪🔬

Chris Russo’s group, inc. Joshua Dickerson, adapted #cryoEM to work at liquid helium temperatures (13 kelvins), where every frame captured contains more information than the equivalent using liquid nitrogen (81 kelvins).

Read more: tinyurl.com/mwwcunkc

#LMBResearch

Thrilled to share these experiments on shaping focused ion beams to explore different ways of milling. Here, we explore using different beam geometries to generate cellular thin sections/lamellae. The video shows elongating the beam on a charging spot burn www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

One of the best courses for those wanting to learn about EM! Come join us in London 🚇

This is the meeting I always look forward to the most each year! Well worth attending if you can.

Image processing for cryo-electron microscopy Cryo electron microscopy (cryo EM) is a major structural biology method for studying macromolecular complexes and cellular structures in their native states. Stable high resolution cryo microscopes, …

The ever popular EMBO practical course in cryoEM image processing, to be held at Birkbeck College London from 9th to the 16th September, is now open for registrations meetings.embo.org/event/25-cry...

A family of bacterial actin homologs forms a three-stranded tubular structure | PNAS The cytoskeleton is crucial for cell organization and movement. In Eukaryotes, it largely consists of the protein actin, that forms a double-strand...

Latest paper from the lab: the Cryo-EM structure of BeeR! (Yes we did name the protein. No it’s not a coincidence)

Karen Davies ‪Formerly of Electron Bio-Imaging Centre, Diamond Light Source, United Kingdom‬ - ‪‪Cited by 2,887‬‬ - ‪cryo-EM‬ - ‪tomography‬ - ‪method development‬ - ‪bioenergetics‬

Sad news about Karen Davies' passing.
Karen was an inspiration in bioenergetics and cryoET. Her pioneering postdoctoral work on ATP synthase and respiratory supercomplexes marked turning points in the field. I created Scholar profile to acknowledge her contribution
scholar.google.com/citations?hl...

📢 Registration is now open for 'Wellcome-MRC Cryo-EM in Structural Biology 2025'!

📅 Join us online March 3-7 at @diamondlightsource.bsky.social @universityofleeds.bsky.social for lectures & demos in #CryoEM & #CryoET: sample prep, SPA, model building & more!🧬

🔗 www.diamond.ac.uk/Instruments/...