Nilesh Banavali

Doudna wins Priestley Medal She will receive a $20,000 research grant and will formally accept the honor at the ACS Spring 2026 conference.

Please join us in congratulating ASBMB member Jennifer Doudna, who has been awarded the prestigious 2026 Joseph Priestley Medal for her groundbreaking work on #RNA molecules with enzymatic functions by @acs.org.
ow.ly/8l9u50X8Sre #ASBMBMemberNews

You won’t believe what degrading practice the Pope just condemned Communication must be freed from clickbait and misguided thinking, head of Catholic church tells journalists The Pope has condemned clickbait as a “degrading” part of journalism, at a private audience with global newswires. Australian media representatives were among those to hear directly from Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Thursday with about 150 members of newswire alliance MINDS International. Continue reading...

You won’t believe what degrading practice the Pope just condemned

Prizes must recognize machine contributions to discovery The future of science will be written by humans and machines together. Awards should reflect that reality.

My HPLC was definitely overlooked

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

tRNA-modifying enzymes in bacterial stress adaptation | Open Biology Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) and their modifications are central to bacterial translation and physiology, yet their roles in stress adaptation remain underexplored. While extensively studied in eukaryotes, a...

Happy to share our new review in Royal Society Open Biology 🎉
tRNA-modifying enzymes in bacterial stress adaptation:
How tRNA mods rewire translation under oxidative + antibiotic stress (MoTTs, moonlighting, therapy angles).
Read: doi.org/10.1098/rsob...
#RNAsky #microsky #AMR #RNAmodifications

UC Berkeley’s Omar Yaghi shares 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry - Berkeley News Yaghi created a field called reticular chemistry, which involves stitching together molecular building blocks to form porous structures — metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — with myriad applications.

Congratulations to my colleagues Omar Yaghi and John Clarke — the two latest UC Berkeley Nobel Laureates! Omar’s development of metal-organic frameworks changed the way we capture carbon, store energy, and harvest water from desert air. shorturl.at/GpBsu 1/2

ANTIDOTE: A Metadata-Driven Neural Network for Improving CryoEM 3-D Particle Sorting www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.06.680814v1 #cryoEM

😭

IG newberlinlibrary

Thank you to the Alaska Raptor Center for telling the truth that birders already knew: every bald eagle cry you hear in an advertisement is a red-tailed hawk.

Translation landscape of stress granules Cryo–electron tomography visualizes stress granules in situ, revealing their spatial interplay with translation machinery.

Translation landscape of stress granules | Science Advances

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social I'm an epidemiologist. Sewage systems are sexy. Dosco Jones @doscojones.bsky.social I'm an engineer. Sewage systems are sexy.

I’m a sewage system. I also have a great personality.

High-resolution ab initio reconstruction enables cryo-EM structure determination of small particles Despite recent advances in data acquisition and algorithmic development, applying single particle cryogenic electron microscopy (cryoEM) to small proteins (<50kDa) remains challenging, even when high ...

Interesting high resolution ab initio reconstruction workflow from Oli Clarke’s group. Wonder if it will work for signal subtracted parts of larger complexes.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

KNexPHENIX: A PHENIX-Based Workflow for Improving Cryo-EM and Crystallographic Structural Models www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.02.680106v1 #cryoEM

Jane Goodall: A Life in Pictures

Jane Goodall: A Life in Pictures www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/s...

(solemnly) You've had mail.

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

The human ribosome modulates multidomain protein biogenesis by delaying cotranslational domain docking - Nature Structural & Molecular Biology By studying dynamic folding intermediates on the human ribosome, Pellowe et al. show that newly made domains help each other to fold but do not stably interact until synthesis is complete, avoiding in...

Our article on human multidomain protein biogenesis is now published in @natsmb.nature.com
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Pre- and postantibiotic epoch: The historical spread of antimicrobial resistance Plasmids are now the primary vectors of antimicrobial resistance, but our understanding of how human industrialisation of antibiotics influenced their evolution is limited by a paucity of data predati...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

2023 Cryo-EM Course - YouTube Held at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, the 2023 Cryo-EM Course offers insights into several aspects of electron cryo-microscopy. This includes disc...

This MRC course (and the references therein) is a great place to start. But it is a very broad topic - if you are looking to target e.g. membrane proteins, enzymes, RNA binding proteins you might get more specific sets of recommendations.

youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Unannotated translation products are widespread in model E. coli Genomes contain orders of magnitude more open reading frames (ORFs) than known protein coding genes, and recent work suggests there may be unannotated proteins present in even the best studied organisms. To address this gap, we used a high throughput reverse genetic toolkit to construct precise C-terminal fusions of a reporter (and control) to >120,000 ORFs in model E. coli . We found hundreds of unannotated significant hits, and individually detected >50 novel polypeptides by western blot, including ORFs within tRNA loci. Many ORFs overlap annotated genes in the sense orientation, and we found these are likely chimeric polypeptides produced by ribosomal frameshifting. Using degron based knockdowns, we identified unannotated proteins that have putative fitness effects, and we found a novel small protein that displays phenotypes consistent with a role in the mRNA degradosome. The observation of a range of unannotated translation products should lead to better annotation and understanding of the bacterial domain of life and motivates the continued exploration of genomes broadly. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Unannotated translation products are widespread in model E. coli | bioRxiv https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.25.678689v1?rss=1

Structures redefine the mechanism of action for tetracyclines https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.25.678686v1

Mosquito-Borne Illness Rarely Seen in U.S. Is Suspected on Long Island Chikungunya, which is endemic in parts of South America, Africa and Asia, may be the cause of a woman’s illness.

Health officials are investigating whether the mosquito-borne virus chikungunya is circulating in New York after a woman tested positive on Long Island in a preliminary screening. The last time the debilitating disease was known to have been transmitted locally in the U.S. was about a decade ago.

🌱 Using ‘compelling’ methods, including #CryoET, researchers mapped spinach thylakoid membranes at single-molecule precision, revealing how photosynthetic complexes are organised and settling long-standing debates on chloroplast architecture.
buff.ly/j3TSIkn

I am excited to share our new preprint on the CAGE complex, a mysterious hollow protein complex that I first saw years ago while surveying Tetrahymena ciliary lysate www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #cilia #protistsonsky 🧬🧪

You’ve heard of #Lymedisease, but have you ever seen the bacteria that causes it? 🦠 Borrelia burgdorferi, the spiral-shaped culprit transmitted by ticks, swims with a creepy wriggling motion and uses #chemotaxis to navigate. Both fascinating... and disgusting #Microsky 🧪 #IDsky @shawlab.bsky.social

RFdiffusion3 is here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

❄️ NEW PRE-PRINT ❄️ Happy to see our latest work online. Here we present a super simple solution to the preferred orientation problem in single particle cryo-EM: the use of ultrasonic excitation during vitrification! Details in the 🧵 below... #cryoEM #structuralbiology

🚀 Check out our new preprint on extending the scope of single-particle cryo-EM with 2D template matching!
Improved cryo-EM reconstruction of sub-50 kDa complexes using 2D template matching is now available on bioRxiv!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Sometimes it's nice to remember that even Marcus Aurelius was like "you don't have to comment on everything bro"

I just find everything feels a bit better when I watch this.

Ribosomal RNA tentacles are targets of free radical damage in mammalian cells during oxidative and inflammatory stress Chemical damage to ribosomal RNA (rRNA) during oxidative or inflammatory stress can impact protein synthesis. Human cells were exposed to a H2O2 titration series to induce oxidative stress or to tumor...

Ribosomal RNA tentacles are targets of free radical damage in mammalian cells during oxidative and inflammatory stress #ribosome #rnasky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...