Abdou Rachid Thiam

We look forward to hearing feedback from the community on our #preprint where we used #NETosis as a platform to show that chromatin decompaction inside the nucleus directly regulates cell mechanics. This work identifies long-range biophysical impacts of chromatin in mammalian cells.

🌟 Thrilled to share that my lab’s first publication is now out in @natmetabolism.nature.com. Congrats to the team 🎉

🧠 We discovered that neurons use endogenous fatty acids as an energy fuel, challenging long-standing models of sugars being the exclusive energy source for neurons. 1/3

How do cells sense & respond to lipid imbalances? What happens when a disease-relevant enzyme is blocked? Shiying Huang investigates phosphoinositide lipids with the Balla lab & discovers an integrated cellular response that boosts alternate lipid synthesis pathways! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Towards a unified framework for the function of endoplasmic reticulum exit sites - Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology Endoplasmic reticulum exit sites (ERES) are specialized ER subdomains that regulate the export of secreted cargo. This Roadmap explores how ERES integrate biochemical and mechanical signals to coordinate trafficking and proposes a multidisciplinary strategy to investigate their function, including in disease.

ER exit sites are dynamic ER subdomains that integrate signals, reshape membranes and steer secretion. Twelve groups in the field came together to map their diversity, regulation, unanswered questions and future directions.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Join us for the first @embo.org meeting on Intracellular mechanics and organelle mechanobiology! Registrations are open, submit your abstract by November 14: we have plenty of slots for short talks! #EMBOMechanobio

What a Line up!

The second manuscript shows that lateral steric repulsion is a key factor controlling protein movement from the ER to lipid droplets. This mechanism can prevent some monotopic ER proteins from reaching LDs, or fine-tune their concentration there.

Seipin beyond LDs: We’re only beginning to uncover what the vital ER protein seipin does beyond shaping lipid droplets. Our work also shows that it tunes the balance between sphingolipids and glycerolipids in the ER, an equilibrium crucial for protein secretion, notably of Cav1.

Fantastic and critical work led respectively by Maxime Carpentier and Alicia Damm.

Steric repulsion counteracts ER–to–lipid droplet protein movement Steric hindrance affects the relocation of ER-to-LD proteins and primarily regulates the LD proteome.

Two new papers from our lab 😀!
Seipin beyond LDs: balances ER sphingolipids & glycerolipids, key for protein secretion (incl. Cav1). www.cell.com/cell-reports...
ER→LD traffic: lateral steric repulsion shapes how monotopic ER proteins partition onto LDs. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Molecular basis for the regulation of membrane proteins through preferential lipid solvation - Nature Chemical Biology Static protein structures can capture the association of lipids, but it is unclear whether the association is due to lipids acting as long-lived ligands or the solvation of preferred lipids around the protein. A computational-experimental framework has now shown that for the protein CLC-ec1, it is the change in lipid solvation energies that drives dimerization, with preferred lipids around the protein modulating this driving force.

Are the lipids associated with static protein structures there as long-lived ligands or an effect of preferential solvation? This computational-experimental framework shows the way! #lipidtime #compchem

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

So flattering! Thanks @biophysicalsoc.bsky.social for this deeply meaningful award! All credit goes to my lab members and collaborators.
@scilifelab.se @ki.se

Congratulations Erdinc!!!

Erdinc Sezgin to Receive 2026 Early Independent Career Award
www.biophysics.org/news-room/er...

Hawa Racine Thiam to Receive the 2026 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award buff.ly/QJrDlUx

congrats Jeremy!!!

Congratulations to @jeremybaskin.bsky.social (2017 #BYI), one of three recipients of the 2025 Ono Initiative Breakthrough Science Award for research on “Control of Protein Degradation by an Unusual Protein Modification."

Metabolic heat flow from the minimal cell JCVI-Syn3B reveals the lipidome-dependence of growth and metabolism The cell membrane facilitates interactions with the environment and serves as an organizational platform for coordinating cellular processes, with lipids playing a central role in determining membrane...

🌶️ Lipids bring the heat 🔥

Lipids don’t just shape membranes, they influence cellular metabolism.

We show that tuning lipidome composition strongly alters metabolic heat flow in the minimal cell JCVI-Syn3B 🦠

Fantastic collaboration with Karim Fahmy’s lab (HZDR) 🎉

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

Congratulations Hawa !!!

Congratulations to our Institute Scholar Hawa Racine Thiam for winning the 2026 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award. Hawa is being recognized for being a trailblazer of subcellular biophysics and unveiling new paradigms of biophysical immunology through her dynamic measurements of physical forces on organelles in real time.

Congratulations to our Institute Scholar @hawa-racine.bsky.social for winning the 2026 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award! @biophysicalsoc.bsky.social
www.biophysics.org/news-room/bi...

Biomembrane Days 2025 Membranes form the intricately shaped compartments of life. The Biomembrane Days are a triannual workshop that highlights recent advances in understanding the morphology and molecular organization of ...

Major cool membrane conference coming up next week! The Biomembrane Days 2025, organized by an amazing team from the MPI for Colloids and Interface Science @mpici.bsky.social: Rumy Dimova (@dimovalab.bsky.social), Helge Ewers, and Thomas Weikl. I'm so very much looking forward to attending! 🤩 🧪

Will miss it unfortunately, enjoy it!

One of the important benefits of @reviewcommons.org is having a peer-reviewed preprint, which to an increasing number of funders counts as a published paper @embo.org

Saves important time for trainees to have their work recognized.

Structural basis for mTORC1 activation on the lysosomal membrane - Nature Cryo-electron microscopy was used to study human mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) activation on lysosomal membranes, showing progressive recruitment by RAG–Ragulator, RHEB and R...

Version of Record
Structural basis for mTORC1 activation on the lysosomal membrane
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations to you all, wonderful, looking forward to reading it.

Wonderful to see our paper on the #organelle signatures of #neurons and #astrocytes out in final form - congratulations, Shannon Rhoads and team!🎉 t.co/BPxKlbU6Ou

Previous preprint is now published in RSC Chemical Biology.
If you are interested in plasma membrane labeling, see the paper! 👇
pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

Join us in celebrating the #ASBMB26 Award Winners!
• @abu-remaileh.bsky.social
• Suzanne Barbour
• @bradylabupenn.bsky.social
• George Carman
• Joseph Cotruvo
• Roger Davis
• @rolanddunbrack.bsky.social
• Pamela Mertz
• @olzmannlab.bsky.social
• Kim Orth
• Margaret Phillips
ow.ly/x05f50WSbax

What allows lamins A and C to confer much stronger mechanical stability to the nuclei than lamin B? We show that even though all lamins can protect the nucleus from small cell intrinsic forces, only lamin A/C protect the nucleus from large deformations: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/n

😂😂😂😂