Thilani Babuji

How do the two most abundant glial cell types in the brain "welcome" red blood cells and other things coming through the blood vessels? Check the image below! 🤓 🔬 🧠

Astrocytes 🔵
Microglia 🟡
Red blood cells 🔴

#FluorescenceFriday

Wonder doesn’t flinch. It’s our compass pulling us toward curiosity, creativity It reminds us: #science & #discovery are good. Here’s a moment that stirred mine: a new PI(3,4)P₂ probe illuminating the cell membrane & endosomes. Marvel with me. Captured on #FluorescenceFriday for #MicroscopyMonday

I got hit by some rather sudden and extreme financial hardship so if anyone is in need of remote wetlab contract research, strictly BSL1, do let me know. Currently scrambling for gigs.

Plant, Bacterial, Archaeal Non-model Bioeng
Custom Lab Hardware
Turn Key Genetic Design

Please repost for reach 💚

You wear them well! (as ever 😊)

Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19 THE ORIGIN “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” publication — which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak

🧪Holy shit. The Covid.gov website directs to the WH website claiming that covid came from a lab leak. And they are blaming Anthony Fauci. And calling the NIH a failure. I am utterly speechless. Anti-science propaganda running its wheels in real time.

aside: a stunning comment from David Baker, UW professor who won the Nobel Prize in 2024. Now 15 lab members are looking for positions overseas.

“There’s so many amazing people who want to come in, & we can’t take them. The Nobel Prize was just a little blip. But things have gotten quite bleak.”

I offered to present online but was told that this isn’t possible. We need to change this culture! In a world where scientists cannot travel freely, it should be possible to attend virtually. There are always people who can’t travel who shouldn’t be excluded. Science belongs to everyone, everywhere.

And a postdoc position available working between our lab and the Woolfson lab designing proteins and peptides to augment intracellular transport pathways t.co/0WWgylZMbS

Molecular mechanism for cargo-mediated initiation of kinesin-1 activation Kinesin-1 is a dynamic heterotetrameric assembly of two heavy and two light chains (KHC and KLC) that mediates microtubule-based intracellular transport of many different cargoes. The complex adopts a...

New preprint on kinesin inhibition and activation - collaborative effort across Bristol Biochem and Chemistry with Woolfson and Schaffizel labs and JJ Phillips in Exeter 1/2 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Pls re-skeet! There's a postdoc job available to join us in Bristol! We're looking for a molecular cell biologist to help us investigate plasma membrane proteostasis in neurons. Apply here by 23 April: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DMO097/r.... If interested, do contact me and check out grieve-lab.com! Thanks!

Today @gogs-k.bsky.social, @tlhr.bsky.social, and I are launching @bindresearch.org, a UK-based not-for-profit research startup to deliver publicly–available tools and datasets to make intrinsically disordered proteins druggable. 🍝 💊🧲 💻 🦠

Summer #internships in cell, developmental, and systems #biology, #biophysics, #mathematics (and more) @mpicbg.bsky.social @mpipks.bsky.social. Applications are open now:
www.imprs-celldevosys.de/join/interns....

Join us in #Dresden over the summer!

Trump policies sow chaos, confusion across scientific community U.S. scientists, unaccustomed to shock-and-awe political assaults, are reeling from President Donald Trump’s executive orders on DEI, gender and other subjects.

When Scientific American endorsed Harris, many scientists and science-friendly people were supportive and grateful, but some said: stick to science, science isn’t political, etc. But reality-denying right-wing fanatics will absolutely come for the scientists www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

📢 JOB VACANCY

4-Year Postdoc Position in Protein Design at @bristoluni.bsky.social

Develop new peptides and proteins to manipulate, target and probe the mechanisms that underpin intracellular transport by microtubule motors.

More: www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find-in...

Deadline: 6 Feb 2025

Mitochondria consist of networks of cylindrical tubes, right? Not necessarily! - in our new preprint, @gavsturm.bsky.social investigates how mitochondria transiently adopt a beads-on-a-string morphology

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

Kinesin-1 is highly flexible and adopts an open conformation in the absence of cargo ​​Kinesin-1 is an essential anterograde microtubule motor protein. The core kinesin motor is a homodimer of two heavy chains; N-terminal motor domains hydrolyse ATP and walk along microtubules, whilst...

There’s a lot more to say about it, but it can wait till the new year. There’s a big addgene deposit with a bunch of useful dual CLIP and SNAP tagged things that will hopefully be useful for lots of folks (Merry Christmas!), as well as kinesin stuff.

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

StayRose: a photostable StayGold derivative red-shifted by genetic code expansion https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.13.628370v1

The Role of the Endosomal System in Alzheimer’s Disease. at University of Liverpool on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - The Role of the Endosomal System in Alzheimer’s Disease. at University of Liverpool, listed on FindAPhD.com

I have a funded PhD studentship available to start in my new lab in 2025! If you are interested in Endosomal Biology, Astrocytes and Alzheimer’s Disease have a look:
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Please feel free to share.

Read about my amazing PhD student Ryan. Many thanks to CoB for hosting him for 3 months

@christanny.bsky.social will present her PhD work on #Cytoskeletal- #Golgi crosstalk during cellular #migration through #confined environments, P2586 Tuesday Dec 17, B195, 11:15am - 12:45pm #cytoskeleton #CellBio2024 @ascbiology.bsky.social

Impressive work by @franknoe.bsky.social and team! A pragmatic tour-de-force combining experimental and predicted protein structures, MD simulations and experimental stability data to sample conformational ensembles of proteins. Think AlphaFold, but capturing multiple free energy minima.

Closing the scissor-shaped curve: Strategies to promote gender equality in academia Gender inequality in STEM fields remains pervasive and undermines the ability for talented individuals to excel. Despite advances, women still encounter obstacles in pursuing academic careers and reac...

Reading the paper in Cell about how to close the scissor plots in gender representation at senior academic positions, I feel just a touch of pessimism. Having reached a level of seniority (middle management) I didn’t think I ever would, I read these great ideas wanting more, much more /1.

Cool project, great new PI!

This scheme shows the cargo adaptor FHF in the middle with arrows pointing to distinct microtubule and actin-based motors (dynein-dynactin, KIFC1, KIF1C and myosins V, IX and X as well as Tropomyosin 1). It also shows a link to Rab5 marked early endosomes. The hypothesis is that FHF coordinates multi motor binding at the early stages of endocytosis. The PhD project would address the hierarchy of motor binding and how these motors coordinate to allow the newly formed vesicle to transition from the actin to MT cytoskeletal network.

If you’re interested in how molecular motors coordinate to power intracellular trafficking events (e.g. endocytosis), I’ve got a PhD position available to study this at vibrant Bristol uni. In this project, we will capture highly dynamic events by #cryoEM, single molecule imaging & cell biology. 🔬❄️🧪

I wish there was an easier way to communicate to early career people what being at the next stage is actually like.

You can describe it, but it’s like an embodied experience that’s very hard to help people really understand. There’s no analog.

Unfollowing hyperpartisan influencers can reduce partisan animosity by 24%.

It was a "structural intervention", changing people’s daily information diet for at least a year.

osf.io/acbwg

Authors: among else @steverathje.bsky.social @jayvanbavel.bsky.social

I thought #fluorescencefriday would be a good opportunity for my first post here. Here are some crazy actin dynamics imaged with TIRF

The Microscopists The Microscopists is a podcast from Bitesize Bio and ZEISS Microscopy that takes you into revealing, entertaining, and personal meetings with the great microscopists of our time. Your host is Dr Peter...

Just maybe my proudest achievement will be #TheMicroscopists podcast which highlights the scientists themselves, and not just their amazing science. Revealing their hobbies and passions, their best and most difficult times.
Be inspired: bit.ly/the-microsco... and please share

Hi! I'm Max. I'm developing a #biophysical model of #microtubules in #neurons during #development. The model is based on my surprising experimental finding (lots of live-cell imaging) that the entire microtubule array in neurites flows retrogradely into the soma: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪 🧠📈