Hannes Maib

Every good research opens up new questions and new possibilities. Stating that “No more research on this topic is needed” is the pinnacle of hubris and ignorance

Being on your podcast has been great fun and I really enjoyed it! Hope you will find something else and I am sure it wont be the last we hear of you 😊

Great resource and evaluation on everything to do with preprints in the life sciences! Preprints have been transformational and there is a lot of good work being done at @ripplingideas.bsky.social !

Imaging phosphoinositides during mitosis ! Cells stained against PI(4,5)P2 using recombinant biosensors (tinyurl.com/447fabz8)
PI(4,5)P2 is up regulated for cortex-membrane attachment. Also notice the membranes being shed and taken up by non-mitotic bystanders. #blebbisomes
@mag2art.bsky.social?

We're hiring! Enjoyed @jackholcombe.bsky.social PhD Prize talk @edrc2025.bsky.social @fly-eds.bsky.social? We're recruiting a #postdoc to explore how cell biology is patterned in the #Drosophila renal system. Come join us for live-imaging, molecular cell biology and omics! Deadline 25th January.

Early bird deadline in 10 days!! This is going to be amazing!

Two days left to apply for a PhD position in plant development with me, Sam Amsbury and Andrew Fleming!!

While this does not solve the underlying issues with for-profit entities exploiting the free labour of academics, it does make my life easier in the short term. At the moment funders require me to publish open access while refusing to pay for the APC (a bit of a catch22). So this will help with that

For the discovery of underlying truths about how life works. In my opinion it is the satisfaction of this intrinsic curiosity that has driven humanity to achieve so many great things. Science is not done for anyone but is an intrinsic human expression, just like poetry, dance and all art

I think it would be fun to see what “science” AI would come up with without any human input. I image it like putting Shakespeare through Google translate through 40 different languages to end up with complete nonsense.

#membrane seminars are back this THURSDAY for a super session with @dr-downes.bsky.social from the @giuliazanetti.bsky.social lab and Xin Zhou from the Ikonen lab! @felixmendu.bsky.social @ishier.bsky.social

I completely agree. And local concentrations can be very variable and what is a competitor for one person might be an interesting interaction partner for another

And having high affinity, site specific binding to protein A does not rule out having weak and transient interactions with protein B

In no word have I mentioned LLPS. But to state that fuzzy interactions don’t occur or might not be physiologically important seems very limited. As you said yourself “fuzzy interactions are soluble in cytosol”. Therefore fuzzy interactions with partners in the cytosol exist and can be very important

Surely protein-protein interactions come at all scales of affinities and AlphaFold is very good at the high affinity interactions but less so for weak and transient ones

In most papers the spectre of the two phases need not be involved at all. The argument has become largely semantic and few people are actually thinking about LLPS that you described and are focused on multivalent (classical) biochemistry but have been tricked into selling this as phase separation.

However, as the result of this hype a lot of good science has been done around the importance of these multivalent interactions in many diverse processes. Also IDPs have gotten a lot of attention now and are being appreciated to be functionally crucial components of protein-protein interactions.

When LLPS hype first began, I tried hard to understand it and still found it quite difficult to make real sense of. I think some leading researchers have used language deliberately crafted to confuse people into reframing ordinary, weak, multivalent interactions as mystical “Phase Separation”

That’s exactly it! I think the hype around LLPS has made people rediscover the importance of weak, multivalent, “fuzzy”, interactions as drivers of many diverse processes. I don’t really think most people think of the “true” liquid liquid phases and it has just become the trendy word now

Dont think liquidity is anything that can be inferred. I used to FRAP clathrin coated pits a lot during my PhD. They are very ordered lattices and recover in seconds. Wonderful dynamic structures but very much not liquid

* can’t trust…. (Sorry for the obvious typo)

This is making the rounds and people are be worried about fake data being published.
I don’t see the point. All data can already be faked. All graphs and numerical data can freely be made up. Controls and samples can be switched.
If we can trust scientists and institutions we might as well stop.

Thank you so much for having me! It’s been a great visit and I can’t wait to show the prime quality photo we collected to everyone. Some great science coming up!

Really glad to show our recent work using recombinant phosphoinositide probes to investigate membrane identity changes during endosomal trafficking. Should be a great mini symposium to highlight the power of fluorescent microscopy techniques for cell biology!

In what world do 15 hours courses send the right messages towards a healthily work life balance in academia? And this is definitely not balanced by a plate race or anything like that. It is no wonder that phd students get more and more burned out

SNAP-tag2 for faster and brighter protein labeling - Nature Chemical Biology SNAP-tag is a widespread tool for labeling protein for bioimaging. Now, Kühn et al. report SNAP-tag2 with increased labeling kinetics and brightness, which translates into a better performance in live...

📣Paper alert! Interested in faster and brighter protein labeling than before? 👀 @steffi-k.bsky.social & other colleagues have developed an improved tool for labeling proteins with synthetic fluorophores for bioimaging. Also works in STED microscopy 🤩🔬 Congratulations!🥳
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Shit.

In all my interactions with @jacoates.bsky.social I can vouch for his sincere commitment and drive towards open science and engagement. Moving on from his role with ASAPbio will be a great opportunity for whomever he will work with next!

A graphic for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), showing a historical portrait of Marie Skłodowska-Curie overlaid with an image of four young researchers walking down a hallway. The European Commission logo is in the top left. Text reads: "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – €404.3 million to support postdoctoral researchers”

Choose Science. Choose Europe.

A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships 2025 call is now open.

With a budget of €404.3 million, it will support around 1,650 researchers from Europe and beyond.

Apply by 10 September → europa.eu/!fBTMgF

I’d prefer one meeting a day. Having one meeting freshens up my mind and gets me thinking, which also helps with writing. Many meetings a day drag me down and exhaust me, which is also worse for the other person in the meeting as they won’t be able to get the best out of me