iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if I’m booking it down the road on my bike and glance at my wrist, I’m probably not looking for a “keep it up” (that can only be dismissed by swiping WITH MY OTHER HAND). I probably want to see what time it is. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

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Wyoming Wormboy @wyomingwormboy.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

Please repost! This comes from the good people at ChimeraX, who produce powerful up-to-date software to study protein (etc) structures, which are FREE to the community. 🙏 To stay viable and serve us, they need an experienced structural biologist to assume the leadership role on a funded project.

aprecruit.ucsf.edu

Faculty Position – In-Residence

University of California, San Francisco is hiring. Apply now!

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Alisia Fadini @alisiafadini.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

ROCKET 🚀 inference-time optimization of AlphaFold to fit structural data is published! rdcu.be/fa9YH Since our preprint, we’ve pushed it to regimes where other methods break: low resolution, weak signal, real experimental edge cases. Here’s what we learned: 1/15

rdcu.be

AlphaFold as a prior: experimental structure determination conditioned on a pretrained neural network

Nature Methods - ROCKET improves experimental structure elucidation by integrating implicit structural knowledge from OpenFold, a trainable reimplementation of AlphaFold2, with X-ray...

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

The juvenile sea squirt swims the ocean currents, actively searching for the perfect place to live. Once it finds a nice, solid rock, it sticks itself down and gets to work reabsorbing bits it no longer needs - including its own brain. This post is about human civilisation.

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

You’ve just opened a chemistry themed pub, what are you calling it? The Grin Yard #chemsky

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Kiarash Jamali @kjamali.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

I’m excited to announce that I will be starting my research group on computational enzyme design at the Generative Biology Institute, Oxford, UK (@eitoxford.bsky.social)! PhD applications are open, deadline is Jan 8th (www.chem.ox.ac.uk/genbio-dtp). Email kiarash.jamali@eit.org with any questions!

chem.ox.ac.uk

GenBio DTP

Optional supporting text

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Kate Michie @kmichie.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

This is amazing work lead by Tom (@tlitfin.bsky.social) in my team. Always trying to get more for less and making computing efficient. So satisfying making science resources go further. Boltz2 is great for protein structure prediction and hopefully LMI4Boltz extends its use. Code on GitHub… 🧶🧬

biorxiv.org

LMI4Boltz: Optimizing VRAM utilization to predict large macromolecular complexes with consumer grade hardware

AlphaFold2 has revolutionized structural biology by enabling the prediction of protein structures approaching experimental quality. AlphaFold3 extends this framework to support modelling broad biomole...

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Sam "The Mug Guy" Horrell @drhorrell.bsky.social · 08/01/2025

Had a very long social media break after the last #SynchrotronMugMadness and the bird site's decent into horror. So hello bluesky, I'm a staff structural biologist helping @imperiallifesci.bsky.social solve protein structures with #crystallography and #CryoEM. Please enjoy these protein crystals 💎

Several microscopic iron containing protein crystals in a variety of cookies (blue, yellow, orange, green)

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Kids were complaining that their gaming laptop was getting a bit sluggish… 😳🤢

A solid wall of accumulated dust. Somewhere underneath it is a laptop cooling fan.

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap on your CV? Evolutionary biology: Well, yeah… but then I’ll have two *new* gaps you’ll want me to explain.

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Clausen Lab @clausenlab.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

🎄 xmas preprint 🎄 we are excited to share our cryo-EM structure of UBR4 in complex with KCMF1 and CALM1. the PQC ligase forms a massive ubiquitination arena, primed to amplify ubiquitin chains (E4 activity) and boost degradation of defective proteins. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Architecture of the 1.3 MDa complex of human UBR4 (2 x UBR4/KCMF1/CALM1). Picture shows top and side views of the cryo-EM density map and the modeled structure, colored by protein components and domains.

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

You know what they say about never releasing on a Friday… what does it say about me that I’m releasing on the last Friday before Christmas? 😬 Anyway, ISOLDE builds for ChimeraX 1.9 are now up. Enjoy!

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Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

An interesting finding that some types of HPV infection might be preventing cancer (as opposed to the ones that can cause it). Also features G.K. Chesterton and a brief cameo by RFK Jr.

science.org

HPV Infections: Friend and Foe

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

Man… the fact that there’s a *second* ring galaxy visible in the gap? The sci-fi story (where these are the still-growing explosions from the past firing of some unimaginably powerful galaxy-killing beam weapon) practically writes itself.

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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Rare sighting of wild G-protein in Virginia

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Structural biology people: @ucsfchimerax.bsky.social has entered the building.

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Micha Rapé Lab @micharapelab.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Very excited to present the structural and mechanistic basis for stress response silencing by the monster E3 ligase SIFI. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Dorian Lynskey @dorianlynskey.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Discussing Bluesky migration in terms of liberal flight misses the simple fact that most people use social media for fun not influence and this platform, unlike X and cruddified Facebook, doesn’t feel like you’re wading through shit to reach your friends. It’s not that deep.

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

… has anyone coined the term “Xit” yet?

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 27/03/2024

For ISOLDE users who like to live on the edge: I uploaded dev builds for ChimeraX 1.8.dev… yesterday. While most things seem fine, if you want to use the “isolde add aa” command then *don’t* use this version. Something badly broken, killing the ChimeraX session.

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 26/01/2024

Bugfix released! Unrelated, but I’d strongly recommend updating to ChimeraX 1.7.1 (particularly for Mac users - the 1.7 release inadvertently left out the Metal2 OpenMM implementation; 1.7.1 should get you back up to full speed).

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Tristan Croll @crolltristan.bsky.social · 25/01/2024

Ahh, the pitfalls of software design… turns out ISOLDE breaks when you try to load an MTZ file containing only map coefficients (because I basically never use it that way myself, so didn’t notice when I broke it). Will try to push a fixed version out tomorrow.

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Daniel Hurdiss @danielhurdiss.bsky.social · 12/01/2024

Excited to share our first preprint of 2024! 🎉 researchsquare.com/article/rs-3... This study focuses on PDCoV, an emerging enteric pathogen. We generated anti-spike mAbs & investigated their inhibitory mechanisms using structural & functional studies. #virology #cryoEM

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