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Basil Greber

@bjgreber.bsky.social
2.6K followers 554 following 1.3K posts

Structural biologist. High-resolution imaging of macromolecular assemblies (and landscapes). MRC career development fellow/group leader at the Institute of Cancer Research, London. Views my own.

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Basil Greber @bjgreber.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This further highlights the risks of using tools that were created by companies who were, well, "not very selective" with how they sourced the information required to develop their models. It is becoming increasingly unlikely that users of these tools are being treated any differently.
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The obvious conclusion (to me): if you have proprietary research & you upload it into the Plagiarism Nexus, it's not YOUR proprietary research anymore. Behave accordingly.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 27/09/2026
Ignore for a moment the question about whether Anthropic trains on user sessions. I am I right in reading this as saying that Anthropic's "never-before-discovered" reverse transcriptase was *patented* three years ago?
Dr. Mestre first encountered the enzymes in jumbo phages in 2022 while searching for new reverse transcriptases. He worked briefly as a consultant for ReNegade Therapeutics, which filed a patent in 2023 on a number of reverse transcriptases, including the ones Dr. Mestre found. He is listed as a co-inventor on the patent filing.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 26/09/2026
I think it is very important that Big Balls, personally, goes to jail there are a lot of young goons who think they are invincible and it is important to make it clear that they are not
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 26/09/2026
Yes, yes, I'm sure that will stop all interest in the film.
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Sebastian S. Cocioba @atinygreencell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
IPTG >>> ChatGPT More wetlab for everyone!
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Craig Kaplan @triggerloop.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Cryo-EM peeps are living the dream www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
In-cell structures visualize human pre-ribosome assembly in the nucleolus
In eukaryotes, ribosome biogenesis initiates within the nucleolus, a hallmark multilayered compartment of the nucleus. Structures of pre-ribosomes have been characterized ex situ, but their assembly p...
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Arnaud Vanden Broeck @avbroeck.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Very happy to share the first paper from our lab, out now in Nature Communications!🎉🥳 Structural basis of step II Spliced Leader RNA trans-splicing in trypanosomatid parasites 🧬🔬 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natcomms.nature.com @universitedeliege.bsky.social @rockefeller.edu #cryoEM #cryo-EM
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Maya Voichek @mayavoichek.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Super excited to share my postdoctoral work at @imbavienna.bsky.social @viennabiocenter.bsky.social - We discovered that some retrotransposons, or "jumping genes" 🧬, are able to spread from cell to cell via a new viral infectivity route. A short thread: 🧵👇 (1/7)
AI-generated illustration of the soma-to-germline transmission of retrotransposons described in our work
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
the priority here being the migrants and not the vigilantes is *insane* and also more evidence of my Belphegor theory.
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Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) @snsf.ch · 22/09/2026
🏆 Biochemist Martin Jinek is the winner of the Swiss Science Prize #MarcelBenoist 2026, considered the Swiss #Nobel Prize. He contributed to the development of molecular scissors, namely CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Read more ➡️ sohub.io/3hs4
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Christophe 🔬 Leterrier @christlet.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
This is the updated part. Looks like the movie is an AI-generated fluorescence image from a non-labeled acquisition technique. No indication that the Small World jury and organizers have requested and verified the raw data (as mentioned as a possibility in the competition rules)
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
$3.7 billion spent on APCs in 2025. That's ~1000X more than it costs to run bioRxiv/medRxiv. Worth thinking about as we consider how to fund infrastructure... arxiv.org/pdf/2608.16322
arxiv.org
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Yuan He @yuanhejhu.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
A big week for the lab! Two new papers on how cells repair DNA double-strand breaks: one on getting NHEJ started in chromatin, one on processing the ends before ligation. Years of work by a fantastic team.
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Basil Greber @bjgreber.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Maybe pressure Putin to leave Ukraine alone. How about that?
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Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf @rahmstorf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Sommer 2026: 16.000 Hitzetote 🥵 alleine in 🇩🇪. Dürre. Brände. 🤯 Die Bundesregierung subventioniert jetzt mit 2.500.000.000 € von unseren Steuergeldern die Ursache der Hitze: fossile Brennstoffe. Unfassbar. 🤯🤯🤯 Das meiste Geld landet dann wieder bei den Ölkonzernen, der Lobby gegen Klimaschutz.
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Basil Greber @bjgreber.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I have now read a fair few #cryoEM papers in which authors write "raw videos" instead of "raw movies" when referring to dose-fractionated exposures. I know that journal editors/copyediting staff often suggest this change. But nobody in the field says "videos", so maybe journals need to be told that?
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Basil Greber @bjgreber.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
What could go wrong?
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Prof Gavin Yamey MD MPH @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Two of the world’s most extreme & dangerous anti-vaxx activists & grifters—Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr—headlining a conference held by the extraordinarily damaging anti-vaxx group Children’s Health Defense in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in 35 yrs tells you all you need to know about MAHA
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Basil Greber @bjgreber.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
US president unfamiliar with the concept of buying goods.
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Basil Greber @bjgreber.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Is there a recent review that summarises all the biggest, baddest, most mind-boggling #cryoEM structures out there? What I need is basically just 10 pages worth of "look at this crazy thing!" Suggestions welcome! 😆
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Sjors Scheres @sjorsscheres.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Michel Goedert and myself are looking for two postdocs to work on #cryoEM and #masspec of #alphasynuclein filaments from neurodegenerative disease. Come join our bubbly and friendly team at the @mrclmb.ac.uk in lovely Cambridge, UK. www.nature.com/naturecareer...
nature.com
Postdoctoral Scientist | Neurobiology | Dr Michel Goedert | LMB 2842 - Cambridgeshire job with MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology | 12864505
Postdoctoral Scientist Salary £42,694 per annum Fixed term, 3 years MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK To work in the group of Dr M...
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Basil Greber @bjgreber.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
The “Hunter Biden working for Burisma” people - where are they at right now? Why so quiet all of a sudden?
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 14/09/2026
When we talk about how science is broken, maybe at least consider how a huge collaboration measured the ripples in spacetime resulting the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light years away, as counterweight the guy who had to fake his data to show that people who procrastinate fall behind.
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Joy Jeongyoon Choi @joyjoychoi.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Excited to share our new preprint on in situ chromatin structure of the inactive X chromosome in differentiated female mouse embryonic stem cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵1/8
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I wrote this quickly at a bus stop and didn't realize it would go viral, or else I would have worded it better. But the point is that the media is too credulous about AI killing everyone in 10 years (how?) when climate change is killing people now and will only get worse (we know exactly how).
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Basil Greber @bjgreber.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
👀
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Sami Chaaban @sami-c.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Excited to share that the Chaaban Lab will be opening in January at the Crick!
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Mihaly Badonyi @mbadonyi.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
AlphaFold can now predict protein complexes at unprecedented scale. But once we have a predicted complex, the core question of how much we should trust the interface remains. Existing confidence scores are useful, but their meaning is not always obvious. #alphafold
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Hauke Hillen @haukehillen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Happy to share our new preprint on the structure of the human mitochondrial RNA degradosome, a central player in organellar RNA metabolism! Work led by graduate student @paulafprado.bsky.social in our group. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵 1/9
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Alex Radzisheuskaya @a-radzisheuskaya.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
We’re hiring! 🧬 We're looking for a Postdoctoral Training Fellow to join our group at the ICR in London and work on chromatin biology, transcription regulation and AML. Curious about how histone modifications shape gene regulation and cell identity? Come join us! jobs.icr.ac.uk/vacancies/15...
jobs.icr.ac.uk
Postdoctoral Training Fellow - Chromatin Biology and Epigenetics in Chelsea | The Institute of Cancer Research
View details and apply for this Postdoctoral Training Fellow - Chromatin Biology and Epigenetics vacancy in Chelsea . Salary: Salary range £45,600 - £51,450 per annum. Dependent on re...
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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
As both an academic and a writer, I am repelled by the "this looks like a long document. Would you like me to summarize it for you?" that seems to appear at the top of every pdf viewer now. NO. The *entire point* of good writing (either books or journal papers) is that every sentence has a purpose.
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Alan Brown @alanbrownhms.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Millions of beating cilia keep airways clean. At the base of each is the transition zone (TZ), a gate that controls which proteins enter and leave. In our paper out today in Science, we used cryo-FIB-ET to image the TZ inside human airway cells www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
science.org
In situ structure of the human ciliary transition zone links linker defects to primary ciliary dyskinesia
The ciliary transition zone (TZ) regulates ciliary proteome composition, yet its molecular architecture, protein content, and contribution to motile ciliopathies remain poorly defined. We applied in situ cryo-electron tomography and subtomogram averaging ...
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Giles Wilkes @gilesyb.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
It's always the way, isn't it giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
Graph shows far right support higher where the number of foreign nationals is lowest
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🇵🇸Tim Henke (tɪm 'ɦɛŋ.kə) @timhenke.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Prompted by the scandal around Navier-Stokes, Andreas Thom raises the possibility that OpenAI may also have stolen the work on non-sofic groups:
1/3 I want to record a number of points that I realized after reading up on the controversy. In fact it recalls an exchange I had with OpenAI after its non-sofic-group announcement. It exposes a serious, unanswered question about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished mathematics.

I wrote in an email to Mark Sellke and Sebastien Bubeck shortly after the surprising finding of a non-sofic group using the methods of Kun and myself:
“Another point is that I and a colleague in Dresden were discussing the expander matching problem and various extensions of the work with Gabor Kun actively over the last months with ChatGPT, so that we are of course curious if that was part of the training data or accessible to the reasoning process. There is a certain (frankly unacceptable) lack of transparency here; and I fear it will damage the communal process of math more than the new AI-generated results will benefit the subject.”

Mark Sellke’s complete answer was: “Regarding your conversations with ChatGPT: that did not happen.”

I had explicitly asked about two different things: (1) whether our conversations entered training data, and (2) whether they were accessible to the solving process. The categorical answer now looks as though it addressed only direct access under (2). No such qualification, explanation, or evidence was given. I take this as dishonesty to say the least.
OpenAI now says in the Buckmaster-Alpöge case that no specific user data was accessed, but adds that it “cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”2/3 OpenAI is drawing a distinction that its answer to me erased, despite the fact that my question explicitly made that distinction.
We are not required to reverse-engineer OpenAI’s internal training pipeline to establish what happened. Only OpenAI has the relevant data for that. If Sellke and Bubeck give a categorical denial, it must disclose the basis: product and privacy settings, relevant datasets and checkpoints, and what “de-identified data derived from usage” means.
I disabled model training on 29 June. That control is still only a promise whose implementation users cannot audit, and it is prospective: it does not answer what happened to earlier conversations or to derivatives already selected. OpenAI’s answer did not mention the setting or any account-specific check.
There is also a mathematical parallel, though a less explicit one. The approach of Kun and myself was not the main line of attack on non-soficity, in fact there were other more promising approaches along the line of quantum games etc. OpenAI’s detailed command of our techniques therefore made me wonder how the model found this route. If nonpublic research supplied by users improved a model and the provider then used that model to race those users to publication - without informed consent, disclosure, or credit - that would be ethically indefensible. De-identification may remove a name; it does not remove the intellectual content of a mathematical idea. Sellke and Bubeck seem to be blind to this simple moral aspect.3/3 Sellke’s categorical answer was, at minimum, unjustifiably broad and materially misleading; looking back it was plainly dishonest. Bubeck’s acknowledged attacks and his attempt to exclude Alpöge from a proposed OpenAI-proof paper deepen the concern that there is a loss of moral compass. Taken together, this raises serious questions about their judgment and personal integrity.
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Alexis Rohou @alexisrohou.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Genentech Structural Biology is hiring a Principal Scientist - please share! We're looking for someone with expertise in solving structures and in computational techniques related to dynamics - MD, ensemble modeling, ensemble docking, and/or related methods.
careers.gene.com
Principal Scientist, Structural Biology in South San Francisco, California, United States of America | Research & Development at Genentech
Apply for Principal Scientist, Structural Biology job with Genentech in South San Francisco, California, United States of America. Research & Development at Genentech
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Science Magazine @science.org · 09/09/2026
OpenAI claims it has solved the Navier-Stokes problem. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s known so far about this apparent breakthrough—and the surrounding controversy: scim.ag/4ytDoM0
How an AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy
OpenAI spent millions to solve Navier-Stokes problem, but who should get credit?
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Harmit Singh Malik @harmitmalik.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
So (if I understand this correctly), the way AI (companies) will "solve" all the major problems in maths, biology, and medicine in the next 5 years will be by stealing and building on the ideas of researchers naive enough to think their chats with AI companies would be private.
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Gernot Wagner @gwagner.com · 06/09/2026
Fun(?) fact: @naomioreskes.bsky.social & @erikconway.bsky.social's merchantsofdoubt.org, the book that is, came out in 2010. We've all known for a loooong time what's happening, and it's only gotten worse.
Merchants of Doubt
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Basil Greber @bjgreber.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
👀
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Seychelle Vos @voslab.org · 08/09/2026
⚡Preprint alert⚡ So proud of @amohamed98.bsky.social! Abdallah determined the cryo-EM structure of BRD4 bound to the kinase P-TEFb, defining the molecular basis of this key transcription interaction — and revealing that BRD4 and AFF4 binding are mutually exclusive to P-TEFb. Lots more inside 👇
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Ben Engel @cellarchlab.com · 08/09/2026
MemBrain v2 is on @natmethods.nature.com now? I never had a @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social with 164 citations before😅 ...Which is also to say: Thank you to the amazing #TeamTomo community, many of whom not only beta tested, but also contributed diverse training data. This one belongs to all of us! 🤗🔬🧪
BioRxiv FTW
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Alexis Verger 🧬🧫🧪 @alexis-verger.cpesr.fr · 07/09/2026
A triptych of reviews on the transcription cycle @natrevmcb.nature.com 1️⃣ Initiation Chen & Xu 2️⃣ Elongation @camimoso.bsky.social @isaacfianu.bsky.social @adelmanlab.bsky.social 3️⃣ Termination Song et al. www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
80 year-olds with pro-Palestine signs: arrested as terrorists. Greens planning to block a road, to highlight an existential crisis: sent down for years. Masked far-right thugs blocking roads and ports, using intimidation, obstruction & threatening behaviour: no arrests. The real two-tier policing.
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Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽 @needhibhalla.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
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Basil Greber @bjgreber.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Vacationing in the UK, explained in three simple steps: 1) Depart in good weather. 2) Once at your destination, get rained on every day for a week. 3) Go home the day before sunshine returns.
Black-and-white rendition of a bridge built from stacked stones. It is flanked by trees on both sides, and a river is flowing underneath it. The water is smoothened by the long exposure.
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Patrick - Here for the craic❗️🤷🏼‍♂️😉 @paddyopatrick.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Let’s just imagine for a few moments that they were Asian, Black, Middle Eastern who turned up and effectively blockaded Dover Port.. Now imagine MSM outrage, the inflammatory headlines and rhetoric, the Tories, Reform etc. The “pure cold rage” It’s two tier reporting as well as policing
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Sarah Hörst @planetdr.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
At least in our own galaxy- there are more planets than stars. If you look at a star at night more than likely it has planets orbiting it.
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Judy Weston @westonjk.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 02/09/2026
Trade xkcd.com/3290/
Comic. [Person standing holding hammer above raised knee.] PERSON: Listen up, leg. I’ve been sending you rich, oxygenated blood for years, while you send me worthless used-up blood with no oxygen. Time to teach you a lesson about not ripping me off! [caption] Tariffs
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