Lucas Farnung

RNA N-glycosylation enables immune evasion and homeostatic efferocytosis by chemically caging acp3U. Excited to report this work lead by Vinnie @vinnieviruses.bsky.social and in collaboration with @vijayrathinam.bsky.social in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Revolutionary Science Comes from Unexpected Angles”

Thoughts from our own Tom Rapoport on the role of basic science in curing disease. magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/rev...

Congratulations to our own @sophiero.bsky.social and team for achieving 3rd place 🥉 in the Merck Innovation Cup 2025. The entire lab is very proud of Sophie's achievement!

No installation required—access Reactor now at reactor-farnunglab.pythonanywhere.com and accelerate your experimental calculation workflows.

Reactor lets you save, load, import, and export experimental setups (aka recipes); choose between direct recipe formulation or X‑fold compensation modes; and validates inputs in real time to guarantee accuracy and reproducibility of your biochemical experiments.

Here's the solution: Reactor, a web‑based calculator that automates buffer composition and volume calculations for multi‑component reactions: reactor-farnunglab.pythonanywhere.com

In the Farnung lab, we perform protein complex formation experiments with tens of protein, nucleic acid, and small molecule components. Because of this complexity, calculations to match buffer concentrations often become extremely complicated and tedious. 2/n

I am pleased to announce Reactor—the complex formation calculator for multi-component protein complex formation experiments. Developed by the Farnung Lab @harvardmed.bsky.social.
reactor-farnunglab.pythonanywhere.com 1/n

Beautiful, Kelly. You and your team are on 🔥!

Asking for a friend, what is the gold-standard™️ for generating a composite cryo-EM map atm?

🎥 Our @harvard.edu undergrad Yerosen Daba is runningthe Harvard College Instagram page today. Check out his story here: www.instagram.com/stories/harv... And learn what we do in the Farnung lab (and perhaps you get to meet the man, the myth, the legend aka Boltzmann too)! 📸⚡

A host organelle integrates stolen chloroplasts for animal photosynthesis Eukaryotic life evolved over a billion years ago when ancient cells engulfed and integrated prokaryotes to become modern mitochondria and chloroplasts…

Work from our own Corey Allard allardlab.hms.harvard.edu & Nick Bellono reveals a process by which foreign chloroplasts (derived from algae food sources) are incorporated into novel, host-derived organelles termed “kleptosomes". \https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867425006373

Structural basis for the midnolin-proteasome pathway and its role in suppressing myeloma Nardone et al. elucidate the mechanism of the midnolin-proteasome pathway, showing how midnolin achieves nuclear substrate selection and how established proteasomal components are repurposed to enable...

New work from @xingulab.bsky.social @sshaolab.bsky.social & Elledge lab report structure of Midnolin-proteasome complex & its role in controlling myeloma via ubiquitin-independent degradation. www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Thank you and see you in November!

Thank you, Vijay.

Thank you!

Thank you, Kelly. Yes, we are incredibly lucky.

The 2025 Freeman Hrabowski Scholars | HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholars are outstanding early career faculty who have the potential to become leaders in their research fields.

Beyond excited… www.hhmi.org/programs/fre...

The 2025 Freeman Hrabowski Scholars | HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholars are outstanding early career faculty who have the potential to become leaders in their research fields.

Congratulations to our own Lucas Farnung @lucas.farnunglab.com who has been named as one of 30 Freeman Hrabowski Scholars for 2025 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). So well deserved deserved !! www.hhmi.org/programs/fre...

First PhD candidate (congrats, Dr. James!) to graduate today and check out this beautiful nucleosome/ocean cake made by PhD candidate Della Syau:

Congratulations to 🎓 Dr. Allison James 🎉. Allison is the first PhD candidate to graduate from the Farnung Lab!

My message to Trump’s NIH Director? No one in America wants us to do LESS cancer research.

No one is asking Trump to make it harder to cure Alzheimer's disease.

Yet Trump is cutting all of this NOW and demanding an $18 BILLION cut to NIH next year. Not on my watch.

Schulman lab is ready for the GRK2243 Symposium: Understanding ubiquitination: from molecular mechanisms to disease in würzburg

#wUeBI2025 @grk2243.bsky.social
@jakobfarnung.bsky.social @samuelmaiwald.bsky.social @hannahbkmpr.bsky.social

YouTube video by Fragile Nucleosome Jon Markert

Check out @jonmarkert.bsky.social's recent talk for the @fnucleosome.bsky.social series, covering his recent breakthrough paper (www.science.org/stoken/autho...) on co-transcriptional histone mark deposition of H3K36me3: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByJr...

EndoMAP.v1 charts the structural landscape of human early endosome complexes - Nature A study presents EndoMAP.v1, a resource that combines information on protein interactions and crosslink-supported structural predictions to map the interaction landscape of early endosomes.

New work @harvard by Miguel Gonzalez-Lozano @harperlabhms.bsky.social & @ernstschmid.bsky.social in Johannes Walter lab charts structural interactome of endosomes. #XL-MS #Alphafold Funded by @asapresearch.parkinsonsroadmap.org & NIH. Science continues-despite attacks www.nature.com/articles/s41...

TRIP12 structures reveal HECT E3 formation of K29 linkages and branched ubiquitin chains - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology Using biochemistry, chemical biology, and cryo-EM, Maiwald et al. elucidate how TRIP12 forms K29 linkages and K29/K48-linked branched ubiquitin chains, revealing a mechanism for polyubiquitylation sha...

Excited to share our latest study on how K29/K48-branched #ubiquitin chains are forged by the #E3 ligase TRIP12, and how this suggests a consensus mechanism for chain formation by HECT E3s!

@natsmb.nature.com

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

Farnung Lab

Outstanding work from Allison James who will graduate next month! If you like our work, consider applying to the Farnung Lab. More info: farnunglab.com


🧬🎉Thrilled to share our new chromatin remodeling study! We reveal three states of human CHD1 and identify a novel "anchor element" that interacts with the acidic patch—conserved among remodelers. Our structures clarify mechanisms of remodeler recruitment! Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1l2ik3vVUP...

Watching Sven elucidate this mechanism from an unbiased screen onwards has been one of my favorite experiences as a PI. In these challenging times for science at Harvard, it reminds me of the sheer joy of doing science and making discoveries.

CONGRATULATIONS!! to @harvardcellbio.bsky.social faculty member Tommy Kirchhausen for his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. So well deserved! www.amacad.org/new-members-...