Franck Pichaud

Brand new UCL entrance rehearsing for the UCL200 celebration!

UK’s £8bn research fund faces “hard decisions” as it pauses new grants UKRI boss Ian Chapman said it had been told by the government to

Helpful update into UKRI and research council funding changes from Zoe Kleinman @zsk.bsky.social

But please more focus on 2 things...

1) Immediate effects (eg funding decisions expected in March)

2) Likely disproportionate effects on early career scientists

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is for you – and a great opportunity – if you are establishing a group in Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal and Türkiye...

Great 20k run today — one of my all-time favourite spots!

Words to live by!

Great visit at UBC- impressive student facilities on campus!

Entered 🇩🇰 airspace!

The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing Academic publishing now shows the same decline that has hit social media and online marketplaces.

The great “enshittification” 🧪

theconversation.com/the-5-stages...

Galette des rois @lmcb-ucl.bsky.social , courtesy of @joadelas.bsky.social 👑

How does signalling control cortical tension?

Using optogenetics and AFM, we show that myosin recruitment and cortical tension increase proportionally with RhoA signalling.

More here:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Super work by Pierre Bohec with Guillaume Salbreux and @dianakhorom.bsky.social

polychrome AI-fuelled rendering of a macrophage

Nice image from Anamul Hoque "tidied up" a bit by ChatGPT - won us the "best image" prize at UCL Life Sciences.

Ernst Haeckel, eat your heart out.

UK to rejoin EU’s Erasmus student exchange programme Exclusive: British students will be able to participate in EU-wide scheme from January 2027, sources say

Breaking...

Very good news. A first step towards...?

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

Download our large database of postdoc fellowships in all fields of research.

Database freely available to all; 281 fellowships.

Download here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

It is the most luminous time of the year !

Six new members of the ERC Scientific Council The European Commission has appointed six new members to the governing body of the European Research Council (ERC), the Scientific Council. The term of one current member has also been renewed. In par...

Six new members join the ERC Scientific Council:

🔸Michel Campillo
🔸Emmanuelle Charpentier
🔸Kateřina Králová
🔸Susana Narotzky
🔸Karin Roelofs
🔸Eleftheria Zeggini

Read more: erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

I don't think scientists should work for anyone else. They should work for discovery and for their own curiosity.
– Maria Leptin, ERC President @marialep.bsky.social
(From the episode of the Night Science Podcast coming out next week @nightsciencepod.bsky.social )

We are looking for a Head of Cell Biology here at @kwsgroup.bsky.social Vegetables.

This is a permanent, full-time position located in Wageningen, Netherlands.

jobs.kws.com/job/Wagening...

#PlantScience #PlantSciJobs #PlantScienceJobs #PlantCellBiology #PlantBreeding #PlantSciJob #PlantScienceJob

Phylogenetic signal of egg-to-adult development times and body mass of dozens of fly species reared on a common media.

Egg-to-adult development times, lipid floating assay of larvae, and body mass of select fly species reared on various media.

The Prop recipe we're using supports a rich microbiota, and when we flip adults on it, some species die to a coinfection(?) that occurs when flipped on the prop recipe, rather than the pathogen we introduced.

One microbiota member we recovered from the Prop recipe was a virulent strain of Providencia rettgeri, a known pathogen of Drosophila. Fly species infected by P. rettgeri previously showed a high phylogenetic signal in infection susceptibility, and P. rettgeri has an interaction of critical importance with a single host gene (Diptericin/Dpt, shown in FigC). This microbe, alongside other potential pathobionts (e.g., Serratia, Pseudomonas) likely explains a key part of the susceptibility of different species to infection when flipped on the Prop recipe.

Paper for the #Drosophila community on a food recipe that rears dozens of species. This was a full team effort, with key contributions from UG, MSc, and PhD students! 👩‍🎓🎉

Plus an #infection observation re: Diet x #Microbiota 🦠

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

#EvolBiol #AcademicSky #SymbioSky
1/4

GitHub - aqlaboratory/openfold-3: OpenFold3: A fully open source biomolecular structure prediction model based on AlphaFold3 OpenFold3: A fully open source biomolecular structure prediction model based on AlphaFold3 - aqlaboratory/openfold-3

Looks like OpenFold3 has been formally released in a public "preview". Not quite on parity with AlphaFold3 on a few benchmarks shown, in particular for antibody interactions. All info on the github link. I am sure we will hear more about this from the developers github.com/aqlaboratory...

For over 20 years, the mouse model organism has helped scientists uncover the biology behind human health and disease.

But the mouse reference genomes still have missing pieces.
The first collection of telomere-to-telomere mouse genomes are now available for two key mouse strains.
🧬💻

People with some cancers live longer after a COVID vaccine mRNA vaccines seem to boost the effectiveness of an immune therapy for skin and lung cancer ― in an unexpected way.

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

How Lego MRI scanner sets are reducing anxiety in children undergoing medical treatment Lego's MRI scanner play sets, which launched in 2023, are significantly reducing anxiety and the use of sedation in children, according to new research.

Lego doesn’t sell the sets and instead has donated more than 10,000 of the kits to hospitals around the world.
www.cnbc.com/2025/10/13/l...

We are pleased to announce that the 2nd DrosoSpain meeting #DrosoSpain2026 will take place in San Joan de Alicante from the 9th to the 11th of April 2026 #savethedate

Poster with QR code linking to the position

I'm very excited to announce that UNC Biology has 6 faculty positions open this year! The first is for an Asst Professor who studies organismal resilience using an integrative approach 1/n
unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/307...

Folks whose jobs, postdocs or grad school fellowships or applications were cut short--drop them a line

Live Updates: María Corina Machado of Venezuela Is Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

Congratulations to new Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado for her courageous struggle to bring democracy to Venezuela.

LMB PhD studentship available in the Baum lab to use informatics to infer cell structure from genomic data in collaboration with the brilliant Tom Williams. If you write to me and I don’t reply - try again - the spam filter is hungry…

The #EDS has the pleasure to announce that, after #EDRC2027 in Bonn, we will have #EDRC2029 in Szeged! Don’t forget these hashtags!

This work was done by an amazing team of PhD students, undergraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and wonderful colleagues at Hopkins, Yale (Rong Fan, Xiaoyu Qin, and Mei Zhong), UCSD (Lingyan Shi and Yajuan Li), the Max Planck Institute (David Zwicker), and U. Florida (Mark Atkinson and team).

🚀 Our new paper is out @natmethods.nature.com!

Kuffer & Marzilli engineered conditionally stable MS2 & PP7 coat proteins (dMCP & dPCP) that degrade unless bound to RNA, enabling ultra–low-background, single-mRNA imaging in live cells.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧬 www.addgene.org/John_Ngo/