Craig M. Crews

10 things you wish you knew about inflammatory caspases: a holistic review of their biochemistry, activation, and signalling Caspases are a family of cysteine proteases conserved across all multicellular life which play critical functions that range from cell death, inflammation and cellular differentiation. Caspases cleave...

10 things you wish you knew about inflammatory caspases: a holistic review of their biochemistry, activation, and signalling - Journal of Biological Chemistry www.jbc.org/article/S002...

The fifth talk of the 5th Virtual ChemBioTalks will be given by @kellychibale.bsky.social. He will talk about “Mechanism of action studies of anticancer kinase inhibitors active against the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum”.

Make sure to register for free: https://cvent.me/G1geWW

Ultrahigh-Throughput Multiplexed Screening of Purified Protein from Cell-Free Expression Using Droplet Microfluidics Screening large libraries is essential for protein engineering, but traditional approaches are limited by low throughput and biological variability. Here, we present an ultrahigh-throughput droplet mi...

Ultrahigh-Throughput Multiplexed Screening of Purified Protein from Cell-Free Expression Using Droplet Microfluidics
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code The near-universal genetic code uses 64 codons to encode the 20 canonical amino acids and protein synthesis. Here we designed and generated Escherichia coli with a 4 Mb synthetic genome in which we re...

Escherichia coli with a 57-codon genetic code | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📣 New paper alert! Just out in Cell Reports! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40644298/
Thrilled to share that we have discovered a brand-new anti-phage defense system! Bacteria have evolved various defense strategies (CRISPR etc) to counter phage attacks. We found a new one - fascinating and dramatic
⚔️🦠❄️🔬

Post-Translational Modifications Remodel Proteome-Wide Ligandability Post-translational modifications (PTMs) vastly expand the diversity of human proteome, dynamically reshaping protein activity, interactions, and localization in response to environmental, pharmacologi...

Excited to share a new preprint from the lab. We show that PTMs like phosphorylation & glycosylation dynamically reshape proteome-wide ligandability in cells, including proteins like KRAS. Great collaboration with the Huang Lab, @forlilab.bsky.social and BMS. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Rewiring DNA repair with PARP-based chemical inducers of proximity Chemical inducers of proximity (CIPs) can elicit durable, and often neomorphic, biological effects through the formation of a ternary complex, even at low equilibrium occupancy of their targets. This ...

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

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) whitening is associated with ageing and obesity. A study by Kaul et al. now links mitochondrial stress in BAT with nuclear mechanics through metabolic signalling and epigenetic remodelling, which ultimately contributes to whitening.
www.nature.com/articles/s42...

The small adipocyte-specific transmembrane protein, Nrac, interacts with scavenger receptor CD36 to fine-tune fatty acid uptake and lipid clearance
Siegfried Ussar and collaborators @www.helmholtz-munich.de
www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

Review @cp-trendspharma.bsky.social
Structure–function-guided drug development efforts to target lncRNAs
www.cell.com/trends/pharm...

Review @cp-trendspharma.bsky.social
Piezo1: structural pharmacology and mechanotransduction mechanisms
www.cell.com/trends/pharm...

Thrilled to share our work on the role of Ataxin-3 in lysosome regeneration published in @embojournal.org . Here we show that Atxn3 targets K48-K63 branched ubiquitin chains on damaged lysosomes and mediates restoration of lysosomal function via microautophagy.

www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

In 2025, the Brennecke lab revealed how ancient endogenous retrotransposons diversified like Darwin’s finches, each adapting to a specific cell type within the Drosophila ovary. Read more about the Brennecke Lab’s research: imba.science/BrenneckeLab

Great new features in Jalview that allow you to explore protein structures predicted by AlphaFold

Fig 2 from paper - distance depend BRD4 degradation from 'oligoPROTACs'

We observed distance-dependant protein degradation (like a small mol PROTAC) by attaching PROTAC warheads onto non-complementary base pairs at the same end of a double stranded DNA - thereby forming our 'oligoPROTACs'

Proteins dance.

Molecular dynamics animate life, but their analysis is limited by the capabilities of current measurement technologies.

Scientists are Learning to Rewrite the Code of Life In a giant feat of genetic engineering, scientists have created bacteria that make proteins in a radically different way than all natural species do.

Meet Syn57, a living cell that only needs 57 codons, not the standard 64. Here's my story on how synthetic biology is tackling the mystery of our bloated genetic code. Gift link: nyti.ms/3Hf4f9v

Diffusing protein binders to intrinsically disordered proteins www.nature.com/artic...

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#proteomics #prot-paper

Next-Generation Protein–Ligand Interaction Networks: APEX as a Powerful Technology www.mdpi.com/2227-73...

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#proteomics #prot-paper

Congrats Todd!

Transient APC/C inactivation by mTOR boosts glycolysis during cell cycle entry - Nature APC/C activity is transiently inhibited to generate a pulse of glycolysis that is required for mammalian cell cycle entry.

new out in Nature: cell cycle meets metabolism
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Design of highly functional genome editors by modelling CRISPR–Cas sequences - Nature Gene editors designed using artificial intelligence can undertake precision editing of the human genome.

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

When is a Monomer not a Monomer? The Top Three Ways Your Favorite Fluorescent Protein Oligomerizes in Cells Many commonly used fluorescent proteins form dimers producing artifacts in a variety of experimental settings. Learn how to avoid these artifacts.

💡 Always a good time to be reminded: "if you fuse your protein of interest to GFP or EGFP to study the protein's behavior ... you are using a tag with a serious drawback."
Same goes for anything that doesn't have 'm' in its name (looking at you, dTomato and StayGold)

“Revolutionary Science Comes from Unexpected Angles”

Thoughts from our own Tom Rapoport on the role of basic science in curing disease. magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/rev...

Computationally Driven Top-Down Mass Spectrometry of Ubiquitinated Proteins www.biorxiv.org/cont...

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#proteomics #prot-preprint

Chromatin Profiling: From ChIP to CUT&RUN, CUT&Tag and CUTAC (Steven Henikoff) | Epigenetics Podcast In this episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we caught up with Steven Henikoff from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle to talk about his work on Chromatin Profiling: From ChIP to CUT&RUN, CUT&Tag and CUTAC. In the last few years Steven Henikoff has been developing methods which profile the chromatin landscape by using enzyme tethering. The quest first started with ChEC-Seq, which improved on Uli Laemmli's method of Chromatin endogenous cleavage (ChEC) but used sequencing as a read-out rather than southern blotting. Next, Cleavage Under Targets & Release Using Nuclease (CUT&RUN) was developed by making a fusion protein of Protein A and micrococcal nuclease (MNase), making it possible to achieve antibody-targeted cleavage of chromatin fragments. And finally, Cleavage Under Targets & Tagmenation (CUT&Tag) was developed by using Transposase Tn5 instead of MNase, which adds sequencing adapters and fragments chromatin at the same time, streamlining the protocol even further. In this episode we discuss how working on centromeres set the stage for Steven Henikoff’s subsequent work, how he developed CUT&RUN and CUT&Tag, what the advantages and disadvantages of those methods are and how he developed all those experiments at home in his garage.   References Takehito Furuyama, Steven Henikoff (2009) Centromeric nucleosomes induce positive DNA supercoils (Cell) DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2009.04.049 Kristina Krassovsky, Jorja G. Henikoff, Steven Henikoff (2012) Tripartite organization of centromeric chromatin in budding yeast (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1118898109 Jorja G. Henikoff, Jitendra Thakur, … Steven Henikoff (2015) A unique chromatin complex occupies young α-satellite arrays of human centromeres (Science Advances) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1400234 Epigenomics Methods: ChEC-Seq, CUT&RUN, AutoCUT&RUN, Improved CUT&RUN, CUT&Tag, Automated CUT&Tag, CUTAC, scCUT&Tag.   Related Episodes The Role of Non-Histone Proteins in Chromosome Structure and Function During Mitosis (Bill Earnshaw) Hi-C and Three-Dimensional Genome Sequencing (Erez Lieberman Aiden) In Vivo Nucleosome Structure and Dynamics (Srinivas Ramachandran)   Contact Active Motif on Twitter Epigenetics Podcast on Twitter Active Motif on LinkedIn Active Motif on Facebook Email: podcast@activemotif.com

CUT&Tag and CUT&RUN: Redefining the Standards for Protein–DNA Mapping in Epigenetics: https://epigenetics-podcast.micro.blog/2025/07/30/cuttag-and-cutrun-redefining-the.html

Image credit: @gloglita.bsky.social‬ @lifescienceeditors.bsky.social‬ captured DynaTag in action: a pA-Tn5 probe (multicoloured) binds an antibody (white), which binds p53 DNA-binding domain (green) on DNA (blue) within 2 nucleosomes

🧪Move over CUT&Tag, there’s a new #TranscriptionFactor mapping method in town.
Our newly developed DynaTag is faster, cleaner, more sensitive than #ChIPseq, #CUT&RUN and #CUT&Tag.
🔗 Our @natcomms.nature.com paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧵Let’s break down what makes DynaTag so powerful (1/7)

Thrilled to see our study on how kinesin-2 motors are switched on and off published in @natsmb.nature.com ⚛️

➡️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congrats to all authors from me and Anthony 🎉 @dunnschool.bsky.social Check out this animation made by talented PhD student @matthew-batisio.bsky.social 😆

You can find these and a million more dose–response curves in this resource article:

Decrypting the molecular basis of cellular drug phenotypes by dose-resolved expression proteomics

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

Bidirectional control of a metabolic transition by the GID ubiquitin ligase The GID/CTLH ubiquitin ligase is a multisubunit E3 conserved across eukaryotes. GID/CTLH has been implicated in a variety of processes, including metabolic regulation, cell proliferation, embryonic de...

Gid11 is a substrate receptor of the GID multisubunit E3 ligase during a metabolic switch. Specific degradation of proteins linked to glycolysis via their N-terminal threonine lacking N-terminal acetylation. #N-degron Khmelinskii lab @ispt-proteinterm.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...