Matt Pratt

Excited to share our new paper and lipid- and protein-directed photocatalytic labeling method (POCA) just out in @natchembio.nature.com. tinyurl.com/2kcxuvvv. Big congrats to first author Andrew Becker and the whole team for launching our lab into the wild world of singlet oxygen interactomics.

NSF GRFP applicants (and mentors): Was your application Returned Without Review and deemed ineligible despite fitting in the allowed topics?
1) Write NSF
2) Write your Congressperson
3) CC us at grfp@grant-witness.us so we can compile + follow up

Details and template at grant-witness.us/grfp-letter

Ninhydrin as a covalent warhead for chemical proteomic-enabled discovery and selective engagement of reactive arginines Covalent molecules have emerged as next-generation therapeutics and as powerful tools for perturbing fundamental biological processes. Chemical proteomic methods to screen for reactive proteinaceous a...

Is arginine the new cysteine?! Check out our lab's latest in collaboration with @ianseiple.bsky.social's team where we introduce ninhydrin as a selective covalent warhead and probe targeting reactive arginines.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Send her home before she freezes to death. 😜

Depends on the IACUC kids!

Very cool Kathrin!

🚨 3 weeks to go! 🚨
Join us for the 2nd LA Mass Spec Day 🧪✨
📅 Oct 17, 10am–5pm
📍 UCLA South Bay Campus
Plenary talks • Contributed talks • Posters • Networking
👉 Register: lnkd.in/gFdW9rfG
👉 Abstracts: lnkd.in/gb-Qq7d5

Congrats! Nothing comes easy these days.

Benjamin Cravatt awarded Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity - Scripps Research Magazine Benjamin Cravatt, the Norton B. Gilula Chair in Biology and Chemistry at Scripps Research, will receive the 2025 Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry. Established in ...

Congrats to Benjamin Cravatt on receiving the 2025 Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry from @elsevierconnect.bsky.social, honoring his pioneering activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) to study and target disease-relevant proteins.

ZBTB11 depletion targets metabolic vulnerabilities in KRAS inhibitor-resistant PDAC - Nature Chemical Biology Depletion of a transcriptional factor ZBTB11 using molecular glue degraders can overcome oxidative-phosphorylation-mediated KRAS inhibitor resistance in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma with low acute...

Excited to share our latest work developing molecular glue degraders of ZBTB11, now out in @natchembio.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ranking Member Lofgren Calls Trump Out for Corrupt Executive Order Requiring Political Appointees to Approve Federal Grants | House Committee on Science, Space and Technology The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology

“This Executive Order is nothing short of obscene," said Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). "In what world does Donald Trump think that Americans want political appointees – who, need I remind the President, are unelected bureaucrats – making decisions on what science gets funded?”

The NIH budget will INCREASE by $400 million — not slashed by 40%, as Trump proposed — according to a proposal by Senate appropriators, says Sen Murray.

"Some have asked if there will even be an NIH by [2029]. The commmittee's resounding message is yes—Congress has your back", she says.

35 non airport-only visits

A major NIH grant to study ways to restore hearing was terminated by the Trump administration bc it was awarded through a DEI initiative—to a researcher who qualified bc of his own hearing loss www.cnn.com/2025/07/29/h... @manorlaboratory.bsky.social

NIH also faces a more immediate threat: the loss of money it has already been awarded. Trump policies have slowed agency spending so much that Berg estimates the agency is at least $6 billion behind in its spending. As a result, a large portion of its $49 billion budget could go back to the U.S. Department of the Treasury when the fiscal year ends on 30 September. In principle the administration could claw back the money in a so-called rescission, like the one that recently cut billions from global health and public broadcasting. In their 25 July letter to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the 14 Republican senators wrote that “suspension of these appropriated funds – whether formally withheld or functionally delayed — could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science.”

This piece in Science:
*confirms that the push for multi-year funding is coming from White House, against NIH wishes
*White House is deliberately slowing spending already appropriated to then cut it via rescission
www.science.org/content/arti...

🧬Power your research with GlycoNet Integrated Services’ Molecular Glycobiology node at the ‪@ualberta.bsky.social‬

Offering:
Custom cell & mouse models (CRISPR, transgenics)
Siglec-Fc protein production
Cell engineering & expert support

Explore more services: canadianglycomics.ca/services/

🔥 Job alert! We are looking for an enthusiastic PhD candidate in the new Chemical Glycobiology Lab at @tudresden.bsky.social! Master in Chem or similar, experience in organic chem including chemoenzymatic, and most importantly: enthusiasm!

Deadline 8th July:

www.verw.tu-dresden.de/StellAus/ste...

α‐Synuclein Sequences from Long‐Lived Animals Display Generally Diminished Aggregation Compared to Shorter‐Lived Animals Including Humans. The overall process of protein aggregation from soluble species to amyloid fibrils is toxic to neurons and can propagate along neuronal connections in ways that potentially explain the pathological p...

Humans don't reproduce long enough to put evolutionary pressure against amyloids. Other animals? We find older-living animals (whales, crocs, etc.) have synuclein that is less prone to aggregation (in vitro) than shorter-lived animals, independent of evolutionary distance: shorturl.at/MtgcR

Opinion | Universities and the government: Which needs the other more? From public health to high-tech innovation, universities are the workhorses of national progress.

Universities are not passive beneficiaries of government largesse. It is the federal government that depends on universities to conduct the research that keeps our nation healthy, safe and economically competitive.I discuss in the Washington Post.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Trump slashed US cancer research by 31 percent: Senate report US President Donald Trump's administration cut cancer research funding by 31 percent in the first three months of 2025 compared to the same period last year, according to a Senate report released Tues...

This should be bigger news, no?
www.yahoo.com/news/trump-s...

DeLAURO: Are you planning to break the law by impounding appropriated funds?

RFK Jr: If you appropriate the funds, I'm going to spend them

D: We have! You're cutting the NIH by $18b. Congress appropriated those funds. How can you justify cutting billions from the biomedical research budget?

Bernie Sanders' office has put out a report this morning on Trump's NIH cuts: "Trump officials effectively cut $2.7 billion in [NIH] funding in the first three months of 2025 – including a 31 percent cut to cancer research through March, compared to the same timeframe last year."

Congrats Ben!

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

Exclusive: National Science Foundation staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced.

Amplifying this. NIH money not used by end of summer is gone.

I've had a new R01 pending for months now, the award is prepared (according to ERA commons), what steps are left before the NOGA and funds released? Feel like many grants are being slow rolled before they are then not funded.

‘It’s been a tough period’: NIH’s new director speaks with Science Jay Bhattacharya discusses staff morale, grant cuts, and “rumors”

This is a great piece. Bhattacharya insisted that the reporter not "write about rumors" because "it spreads panic.” Hours later, those very leads were confirmed.
www.science.org/content/arti...

Statement of AAU, the APLU, and ACE Regarding their Legal Challenge to the National Science Foundation’s Cut to Critical Research That Strengthens America | Association of American Universities (AAU) This is a statement of the Association of American Universities, Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities, and American Council on Education regarding their legal challenge to the administratio...

The AAU, the APLU, and ACE and a bunch of named universities (including @cmu.edu) filed a challenge to the arbitrary cut of indirect costs at the National Science Foundation

(As I write two NSF proposals...)

#SaveNSF #SaveScience

www.aau.edu/newsroom/pre...

Heard this story in person from @laurakiessling.bsky.social at a conference and glad to see it out. I really love approaches where I get to say to myself “man I wish I had thought of that”…simple and elegant.

The current administration’s narrative that Harvard (and all universities) feel “entitled” to federal dollars misleads the public. Nor are these funds a “privilege” 1/n