Ryan Fink

Abolish ICE.

There’s no reforming it.

There’s no compromise.

There’s only one way to rein in ICE’s terror campaign. Abolish it.

An mTurquoise2-Based Glucose Biosensor Glucose is an important substrate for organisms to acquire energy needed for cellular growth. Despite the importance of this metabolite, single-cell information at a fast time-scale about the dynamics...

Great to see this officially out: An mTurquoise2-Based Glucose Biosensor - works in yeast & mammalian cells and is compatible with FLIM: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Today I'd like to honor the memory of my mentor and friend, Roger Tsien, born 1952 February 1. Today would have been Roger's 74th birthday.

Most know Roger for his 2008 Chemistry Nobel Prize with Shimomura and Chalfie. Roger made GFP into the versatile imaging method it is now.

An engineered nanobody inhibitor for molecular-to-circuit control of opioid receptor function. This was a really fun collaboration with @miriamstoeber.bsky.social and @amanglik.bsky.social labs, check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We've got ISSUES. Literally.

We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do?

arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563

A 🧵 1/n

In this mesmerizing video by our #ElectronMicroscopy team, a layer 5 thin tufted neuron is revealed with blue dendrites and purple axon. As it progresses, we zoom into where it connects to a pyramidal cell.

Explore our EM data at: microns-explorer.org

A green lifetime biosensor for calcium that remains bright over its full dynamic range Directed evolution was used to engineer a green fluorescent biosensor for quantitative calcium imaging that remains fluorescent, yet shows a large change in lifetime in cells.

The 'Version of Record' of our paper came out on #FluorescenceFriday
elifesciences.org/articles/105...

@massecklab.bsky.social @finkryan.bsky.social 🥳👏🧠🐭🔬🧪🩷

Fresh batch of Hot Plasmids here! Find new tools for:
🧠 Neural cell-surface proteomics
🔋 Nerve-to-cancer mitochondrial transfer @greletlab.bsky.social
🔬 Red calcium biosensors @massecklab.bsky.social & @piatkevich.bsky.social
✂️ CRISPRa-AAV for adipocytes @nadavahituv.bsky.social
& more!

What happens when you combine 10 years of brain data with one of the world’s fastest supercomputers?

A virtual mouse cortex simulation, thanks to a global collaboration.

🧠📈 https://alleninstitute.org/news/one-of-worlds-most-detailed-virtual-brain-simulations-is-changing-how-we-study-the-brain/

StayRose: a photostable StayGold derivative red-shifted by genetic code expansion Photobleaching of fluorescent proteins often limits the acquisition of high-quality images in microscopy. StayGold, a novel dimeric green fluorescent protein recently monomerised through sequence engi...

mStayRose is published in JBC 🥳🎉

Congratulations @wsctt.bsky.social @sporemohan.bsky.social and team for the monumental effort to make a non-natural amino acid incorporating fluorescent protein accessible. It's based on mStayGold, bright, and photostable:

www.jbc.org/article/S002...

Protein Domain Designer tool for the generation of publication-ready protein domain diagrams

New week, new tool: Find our Protein Domain Designer tool to generate publication-ready protein domain diagrams here: domaindesigner.farnunglab.com

Dying in the weather, but the views in Seoul are incredible

Very excited to be at the #KSBNS2025 in a few days!

I’ll be presenting a poster in the first session (P-097) about our mScarlet based sensor for calcium PinkyCaMP and our developing mScarlet and 5HT1A based serotonin sensor.

Stop by to talk and learn about this new generation of red sensors!

How many photons are in a GFP? — more than last year, and more than you thought. Here's a simple, cheap, and practical method to break a fundamental limit in fluorescence microscopy. But it only works in light sheet!

A sensitive orange fluorescent calcium ion indicator for imaging neural activity Genetically encoded calcium indicators (GECIs) are vital tools for fluorescence-based visualization of neuronal activity with high spatial and temporal resolution. However, current highest-performance...

#OCaMP is now on bioRxiv and reagents are available on #Addgene! 🧪

A sensitive orange fluorescent calcium ion indicator for imaging neural activity

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

For those of you attending academic conferences in the U.S., after October 1, 2025 please note the following:

(1/3) Excited to introduce our new GRAB sensors for a series of steroid hormones! These tools enable real-time detection of steroid hormone dynamics in vivo🐭🧠. Happy to share these sensors and welcome any feedback! Please contact yulonglilab2018@gmail.com for information.

A @csisingapore.bsky.social team showed D-I-Tasser can outperform AlphaFold2/3, elevating high-accuracy protein structure & function predictions. We wonder if this moves us closer to resolving protein–protein complex structure prediction? @natbiotech.nature.com

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

New plasmids available from the @massecklab.bsky.social‬! PinkyCaMP, a mScarlet-based calcium sensor, can be leveraged for its exceptional brightness, photostability, and multiplexing capabilities.
https://twp.ai/4iobS2

High-performance genetically-encoded green and red fluorescent biosensors for pyruvate Pyruvate is the end-product of glycolysis and a central metabolite involved in many biochemical pathways. However, a lack of high-performance (i.e., Δ F / F > 10) single fluorescent protein (FP)-base...

New tools! GreenPy and ApplePy are fluorescent biosensors for pyruvate with huge responses (20–40x in vitro) and a range of affinities (10s of μM to mM). These should be game changers for imaging of metabolism! Great work by Shosei Imai @sikmys.bsky.social and team 👏. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

mScarlet3-H (aka mYongHong) is on the cover of Nature Methods! All plasmids are available for free from WeKwikGene wekwikgene.wllsb.edu.cn/publications...

Here Are the Nearly 2,500 Medical Research Grants Canceled or Delayed by Trump (Gift Article) Some cuts have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye.

New powerful article up in the New York Times on cancelled and delayed grants

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Far-red chemigenetic kinase biosensors enable multiplexed and super-resolved imaging of signaling networks - Nature Biotechnology Far-red kinase biosensors are applied to image kinase signaling networks at super resolution.

Happy to see my Postdoc work out @natbiotech.nature.com. Using HaloTag and synthetic fluorophores instead of FPs enables us to shift the spectral properties of kinase activity reporters (KARs) to the far-red 🔬. Huge thanks to everyone involved @jinzhanglab.bsky.social!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

First PinkyCaMP plasmids are available via @addgene.bsky.social

www.addgene.org/browse/artic...

Cc @finkryan.bsky.social @massecklab.bsky.social

Fig. 1 Photostable and fluorescence properties of mScarlet3-S2. a, b, Photostability of red emitting mScarlet variants expressed in live U-2 OS cells under continuous WF illumination at 1.9 W/cm2

A highly photostable monomeric red fluorescent protein
www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5...

PinkyCaMP a mScarlet-based calcium sensor with exceptional brightness, photostability, and multiplexing capabilities https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.16.628673v1

🎄PinkyCaMP- our christmas gift to you! 🎁: We are excited to present PinkyCaMP, the first mScarlet based calcium sensor with:
✨exceptional, brightness
✨phototability
✨and optogenetic compatability.
Check out our new preprint:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...