Richard Held

Booooo

The cat is officially out of the bag!

The LMB is home to a unique community of outstanding connectomics scientists — I'm so excited about adding my own molecular and expansion microscopy expertise to the mix!

This is going to be the most exciting journey of my scientific career — more soon! 🌈🧠

Heart rate data or RC voltage step?

Saw someone designing a cloning strategy using chatgpt and for some reason that's kinda my breaking point in this particular discussion. How much thinking really needs to be outsourced for the sake of efficiency and who does that really serve in the end?

Segmenting cryo-electron tomography data: Extracting models from cellular landscapes Cryo-electron tomography provides an unprecedented view of cellular architecture, yet extracting meaningful biological insights remains challenging. S…

I have lots of opinions—but for your sake, I’ve limited them to segmentation in cryo-ET for this article 😉
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#teamtomo

Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard (Gift Article) More than 900 research grants worth $2.6 billion are in jeopardy. So is the 80-year-old model of American science.

"The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States." www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Boston is the best city to run in. This is a take I'm willing to fight over.

Having come up through US academia the rug pull of the last few months has been pretty extreme. Wondering how much longer I (& everyone else) get to do science sucks but with some dead-man's logic it also makes me really appreciate the years that I got to spend asking questions for their own sake.

Proud to share our latest paper. doi.org/10.1016/j.cr...

Through the dedication of @glynnca.bsky.social and @cryingem.bsky.social we report a thorough method to image molecular organisation within hippocampus tissue.

Structural biology in tissue is well and truly here!

@rosfrankinst.bsky.social

The Bethesda Declaration

A call to stand up and show support for the Bethesda Declaration, the NIH, and for federally funded science in general.

I believe @cmholab.bsky.social mentioned in a talk that they did something to assess this for plasmodium.

A formidable opponent in the fight against productivity.

New method toward modeling cells and viruses! HMFF enables integrative membrane modeling and simulation guided by electron microscopy data. Created by Valentin Maurer and Marc Siggel @embl.org ‪‪@cssbhamburg.bsky.social‬, in collaboration with @WPezeshkian lab (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A screenshot of the termination notice showing "Outstanding Investigator Grants"

A screenshot of the termination notice with "This award is terminated effective the date of this award, due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students." highlighted

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

Ok microtubule people, what is going on here? Cross section projection images, two different areas and surrounded by intact microtubules:

My colleagues @phaips.vd.st and @florentwaltz.bsky.social have put together this wonderful website with step-by-step tutorials for in situ subtomogram averaging using different software packages 🤩

Check it out, especially if you are a newcomer to the field!

#CryoET #TeamTomo #ChlamyDataset

Not an arctis fan personally. The only real pro for arctis over hydra is the ability to take the cassette straight to Krios without having to worry about lamellae orientation.

Figure 4. MemBrain v2 end-to-end workflow detects periodic phycobilisome organization. A: Raw tomogram slice of EMD-31244. B: Out-of-the-box MemBrain-seg segmentation (light blue). C: A single membrane instance can be visualized in Surforama and manually annotated with GT phycobilisome positions (magenta). D: MemBrain-pick localizes particles (trained with data from C) on all membranes in the tomogram. E: MemBrain-stats computes Ripley’s O statistic using the positions from D with a bin size of 5nm. The distance between peaks (35 nm) was measured to estimate chain unit spacings.

We have updated our #MemBrain v2 preprint with a lot more details about the MemBrain-pick and MemBrain-stats modules, as well as some application examples!

Stay tuned for the upcoming thread by lead author @lorenzlamm.bsky.social! 🧠🧵

#CryoET #TeamTomo
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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...

Exploring shaped focused ion beams for lamella preparation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.01.646235v1

Could run this article for every flight he takes

Maybe Jeffrey Goldberg is in all of our signal chats and we just have to step back from our lives for a bit to really notice him there.

Here's our newest study: we reveal the molecular principles of neuronal excitation by glutamate, and how physiological temperatures influence this process.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Led by @anish-mondal07.bsky.social, published in @natureportfolio.nature.com

Opinion | Universities Can Afford to Fight Trump Every university president will face a choice similar to Columbia University’s in the coming months.

www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/o...

My wife's wisdom from listening to many tech types go on about their weekend ayahuasca journey is that anybody who takes hallucinogens and spends that time thinking exclusively about work is looking in vain for creativity they inherently lack.

There are days in life that shake you.

I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University
& academic career... 1/🧵

a man in a white shirt and tie says now kiss . ALT: a man in a white shirt and tie says now kiss .

Setting up exciting new crosses like

Soapbox: acknowledging that the establishment of pax americana is often a morally complicated legacy does not require you to say there is no "wrong side of history." Nuance =/= nihilism and whataboutism is designed to paralyze you into believing you can never act in a principled manner.

www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

Tldr a bunch of diesel spilled on road this morning