Craig M. Crews

Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres - Nature Evolutionarily related ‘proto-point’ centromeres providing resolution to the evolutionary origins of point centromeres are identified in yeast, and comparison shows they evolved in an ancestor with re...

Our paper is now out in Nature:

“Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres”

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

A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres.

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A model to describe what we show in the paper. INVs are important for sequestering GLUT4 and related proteins into GSVs, the vesicles that are mobilised in response to insulin.

🚨 We have a new preprint out! 🧪

In this paper we look at GLUT4 trafficking. This is a short explainer thread, but please read the paper!

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www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Papers are like buses... You wait for ages, then two come along at once.

Huge congrats to @bornanovak.bsky.social and @jefflotthammer.bsky.social for pushing and driving every aspect of this work, preprinted ~1 year ago to the day (Friday before BPS), now published!

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

Our paper is out in @natcomms.nature.com! APOBEC3s drive mutagenesis in cancer. We uncover a novel pathway keeping them in check. The key is APOBEC3 binding of cellular RNAs, which simultaneously controls their nuclear localization and shields them from degradation.

Read it here: rdcu.be/e4qaa

Such a pleasure to share our commentary on #UFMylation client diversity published in @natrevmcb.nature.com. Thanks to @lisaheinke.bsky.social for the opportunity to write it, reviewers for their peer review contribution, and members of our lab for discussions.
Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Engineering intrinsically disordered regions for guiding genome navigation Liu et al. design and test synthetic IDRs based on simple design rules derived from mutation-based analysis of 25 native TF IDRs. They show that hydrophobic amino acids endow activity, acidic ones pre...

Engineering intrinsically disordered regions for guiding genome navigation: Molecular Cell www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

A Chemical Proteomics Method to Quantify Cysteine S-Acylation S-acylation, often referred to as S-palmitoylation, is a reversible and dynamic posttranslational modification that corresponds to the addition of a long-chain fatty acid to cysteine (Cys) residues. Established mass spectrometry-based chemoproteomics methods have improved our understanding of the S-acylation proteome, notably by identifying hundreds of S-acylated proteins, sometimes with the modified Cys. However, the precise quantification of S-acylation levels for each Cys within a single sample remains challenging at the proteome level. Quantification of S-acylation levels is critical to further our understanding of protein S-acylation in cellular function and its role in health and diseases. We report here the development of an S-acylation quantification workflow based on the sequential labeling of free Cys and S-acylated Cys with isotopic labeling reagents. The workflow was extensively optimized, notably by comparing the number of sites identified with two alkyne-tagged Cys-reactive isotopic probes and four azido-tagged biotin-based capture reagents. By integrating this enhanced workflow with high-field asymmetric waveform ion mobility spectrometry (FAIMS) on LC–MS/MS instruments for the separation of labeled peptides, over 17,000 unique Cys could be quantified in biological samples. Application of the S-acylation quantification workflow to cellular proteomes allowed for the quantification of S-acylation levels in a HeLa proteome. We also identified dynamic S-acylation changes in response to autophagy induction.

A Chemical Proteomics Method to Quantify Cysteine S-Acylation | ACS Chemical Biology pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1...

#chembio and #bioorganic crowd: Registration to ESBOC is open. Join us on 27th-29th May for the oldest meeting in chemical biology in Europe, at the awesome Schlosshotel Pillnitz in Dresden!

Check out www.esboc.org.uk or register directly at eveeno.com/esboc2026!

The demystification of piRNA clusters

if you wonder how cells generate piRNAs specifically against transposons & you are looking for a weekend read

check out @86dominik.bsky.social's opus magna (or Dominik's great thread)

a shared project with the one and only Rippei Hayashi, lab alumnus & friend

Mechanisms linking cytoplasmic decay of translation-defective mRNA to transcriptional adaptation Transcriptional adaptation (TA) is a genetic robustness mechanism through which mutant messenger RNA (mRNA) decay induces sequence-dependent up-regulation of so-called adapting genes. How cytoplasmica...

Ever notice that when one gene is disrupted, its orthologs get upregulated? This phenomenon, known as transcriptional adaptation, has been controversial and mysterious - glad to see that we are starting to learn how it works.

Yosemite Deploys Over $18 Million In Cancer Research And Care Grants Yosemite, a venture capital firm focused on making cancer non-lethal through a blend of academic philanthropy and for-profit investing, said it has deployed more than $18 million in grants through a d...

Yosemite deploys over $18 million in cancer research and care grants #NBTintheNews pulse2.com/yosemite-dep...

Antibody–bottlebrush prodrug conjugates for targeted cancer therapy - Nature Biotechnology Antibody–bottlebrush conjugates expand the options for drug cargos compared to antibody–drug conjugates.

Antibody–bottlebrush prodrug conjugates for targeted cancer therapy - @mitchemistry.bsky.social @broadinstitute.org go.nature.com/46d1T3t

3/ As a PhD student, Hilde Pröscholdt Mangold carried out the embryo transplantation experiments that demonstrated the organiser effect in newts. She performed more than 250 transplants, with only a handful surviving to provide the results that shaped the field.

A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

Ooooh. Cool new paper on origins of life. A simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself.

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

Royal Society of Chemistry awards Carolyn Bertozzi Honorary Fellowship The Priestley Medalist is receiving the honor for her contributions to chemistry and human health

The Royal Society of Chemistry is honoring Carolyn R. Bertozzi with its top accolade, an Honorary Fellowship. cen.acs.org/acs-news/Roy... #chemsky

Two axolotl-adapted cell-ablation platforms reveal macrophage-dependent processes essential for spinal-cord and skeletal regeneration https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.10.705144v1

Our preprint on #NLRP3 #PROTACs has been published @chemcomm.bsky.social! Happy that we could contribute! pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

A successful PROTAC Hackathon hosted at the@crick.ac.uk:

• 34 participants
• 24 reviews generated
• 100% reported improved understanding

Organised by the Chemical Probes Portal with academic & industry collaboration.

Next Hackathon: EUFEPS–SITELF 2026 in Naples 🇮🇹

#ChemicalProbes #PROTACs #EUFEPS

Isomorphic claims major advance with new AI drug design engine, in 'step change' versus AlphaFold 3 Isomorphic Labs has revealed an improved AI drug design engine, doubling success rates in protein-drug structure predictions compared to AlphaFold 3, though methodology details remain limited.

Isomorphic Labs says it’s made a major leap in AI drug design, unveiling a new engine it claims outperforms AlphaFold 3 and could unlock new targets and therapies.

The man, the myth, the legend ... joined Bluesky! Please join me in welcoming Craig Montell @cmontell.bsky.social to the fold!! And on the same day as a new paper from his lab in PNAS (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41662530/)! Give him a follow as he's an excellent scientist and great all around human.

To regulate gene activity, proteasomes - waste disposal machines of cells - must enter the nucleus. IMP Researchers now show how the adaptor protein AKIRIN2 helps ferry this massive complex through the nuclear pore: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69162-0

Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine (IsoDDE), a unified computational drug-design system

Announcement:
www.isomorphiclabs.com/articles/the...

Report:
storage.googleapis.com/isomorphicla...

Discovery and Characterization of Novel BLIMP-1 Heterobifunctional Ligand-Directed Degraders B-lymphocyte-induced maturation protein 1 (BLIMP-1/PRDM1) is a master transcriptional repressor essential for terminal differentiation of activated B-cells into bone-marrow resident plasma cells. Mult...

Discovery and Characterization of Novel BLIMP‑1 Heterobifunctional Ligand-Directed Degraders

Integrase-On-Demand: bioprospecting integrases for targeted genomic insertion of genetic cargo Abstract. Integrases serve as powerful biotechnology tools that catalyze recombination at specific DNA sequences (att sites) and facilitate chromosomal int

Integrase-On-Demand: bioprospecting integrases for targeted genomic insertion of genetic cargo Open Access
doi.org/10.1093/nar/...

Excited to share this preprint about the identification of TBK1 molecular glue degraders in a collaboration between NEOsphere Biotechnologies, @pmeier.bsky.social, and the Centre for Protein degradation @icr.ac.uk www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is how co-translational N-terminal myristoylation occurs on the ribosome. NMT1 acts together with NAC, but after the release of MetAP. Cryo-EM study by Timo Denk et al. @beckmannlab.bsky.social @giglionelab.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Signaling to make human ribosomes: Connections between the cytoplasm and the nucleolus Lawrence et al. examine how ribosome production in the eukaryotic nucleolus is coordinated by cytoplasmic processes to maintain appropriate ribosome numbers. The authors highlight regulatory inputs from cytoplasmic signaling, mitosis, and cytoplasmic organelles that converge on nucleolar function, and they discuss how disruption of these pathways contributes to human disease.

Signaling to make human ribosomes: Connections between the cytoplasm and the nucleolus

Defined media reveal the essential role of lipid scavenging in supporting cancer cell proliferation - PubMed Fetal bovine serum (FBS) is an undefined additive that is ubiquitous to mammalian cell culture media and whose functional contributions to promoting cell proliferation remain poorly understood. Efforts to replace serum supplementation in culture media have been hindered by an incomplete understandin …

Re: media. I've not tried this and the paper focuses on lines with driver mutants that therefore shouldn't need growth factors, but would love someone to show if hek293, cho, etc. perform well with this composition.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40930249/

Maybe another useful entry point for this recent article about why several very successful academics have left Harvard to more efficiently bring their science to patients.

NIH is amazing, but it's not intended for making medicine.

www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/01/harv...

#medsky

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On the balance of knowledge - Nature Reviews Immunology Ruslan Medzhitov shares his thoughts on the balance between generating data and developing theories in immunology, with a focus on exploring the rules that govern complex systems.

Too much data, too little thinking.
A important essay from Ruslan Medzhitov on the importance of understanding data, not just generating it. A must read.
@Yale
www.nature.com/articles/s41...