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Iso Hirst

@isobelhirst.bsky.social
347 followers 420 following 10 posts

Final year PhD student in the Muench group at Leeds, research focusing on sample preparation for cryoEM/ET 🔬

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Reposted by Iso Hirst
Anastasia Gusach @g-anastasia.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
Excited to share a new chapter of my scientific journey in Chris Russo's group — developing a way to freeze proteins faster than they diffuse, paving the way for cryo-EM without air–water interface damage.
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Harry M. Williams @harrywilliams.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
❄️ NEW PRE-PRINT ❄️ Happy to see our latest work online. Here we present a super simple solution to the preferred orientation problem in single particle cryo-EM: the use of ultrasonic excitation during vitrification! Details in the 🧵 below... #cryoEM #structuralbiology
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Oli Clarke @olibclarke.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
This one is a bit of a departure from the usual and definitely a work in progress! We found that by using ab initio reconstruction at very high res, in very small steps, we could crack some small structures that had eluded us - e.g. 39kDa iPKAc (EMPIAR-10252), below. Read on for details... 1/x
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Iso Hirst @isobelhirst.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
I submitted my thesis today!!! 4 years of work in 1 pdf 🤯
Screenshot of thesis submission portal with celebratory emojis
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Iso Hirst @isobelhirst.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
Keeping me company whilst I write 🐓 #phd #chicken
A black and white hen on a table outside
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Amy Devlin [Hiatus] @amydevlin.bsky.social · 27/07/2025
Michelle Agyemang takes the trophy for best young player of the tournament, and well deserved! #England would not be in this final without her magic. #WOSO #WEURO #EURO2025 #WEURO2025 #FOOTBALL
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UEFA Women’s EURO @weuro2025bot.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
Lending Keira Walsh a helping hand to make a fan’s dream come true 🤝🥹 #WEURO2025 || #Lionesses
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Iso Hirst @isobelhirst.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
Nice!!
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womensartbluesky.bsky.social @womensartbluesky.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
Angélique-Marguerite du Coudray was a famous 18th century French midwife who designed various teaching aids to train midwives about anatomy and obstetrics. Her work saved many lives in the age #WomensArt
Cloth model aids for midwifery
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The Women's Game @womensgamemib.bsky.social · 20/07/2025
The Euro semi-final stage is set. Who is winning it all? 🏆 📸: WEURO2025
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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 21/07/2025
Recently I learnt that EMBL-EBI has a free online course about AlphaFold — how it works, strengths and limitations, how to use it — and it's very good! There are also little quizzes and interactives. www.ebi.ac.uk/training/onl...
ebi.ac.uk
AlphaFold - A practical guide
AlphaFold - A practical guide
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Stand Up for Science! @standupforscience.net · 21/06/2025
Trans youth deserve healthcare, not courtroom cruelty. Now, the highest court has sided with bans - against research showing this care improves mental health and saves lives. 💔 We stand with them. We demand science, dignity, and compassion. zurl.co/QejZr
zurl.co
What to know about the impacts of the Supreme Court's ruling on transgender care for youth
The U.S. Supreme Court said Tennessee did not violate the constitution by banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors. The case is sure to resonate nationally.
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Dr Robert Bohan @robertbohan.bsky.social · 20/06/2025
🧵 Activists have broken into British Airforcs Base & carried out sabotage to try to help save Palestinian lives & prevent war crimes. ‘RAF Brize Norton military planes damaged as activists break into base ahead of flight.’ [1]
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Iso Hirst @isobelhirst.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
Really enjoying this review of time-resolved cryoEM 😊 especially this lovely summary figure ✍️ www.cell.com/structure/fu...
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Make Space for Girls @makespaceforgirls.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
Great to see the conversation in the US around how gender-blind design leaves girls out of parks. Also great to see Brickfield Park in Bath mentioned – co-created with teenage girls, alongside inspiring examples from Vienna. Awareness is growing! nextcity.org/urbanist-new...
nextcity.org
Our Public Spaces Are Failing Teen Girls
Op-ed: Adolescent girls are missing from parks, playgrounds — and our gender-blind urban planning. So let’s ask them what they need.
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Edward Nirenberg @enirenberg.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
Some good news. Tentatively. HIV protection with just two shots a year: FDA approves Gilead drug www.statnews.com/2025/06/18/f... via @statnews.com
statnews.com
HIV protection with just two shots a year: FDA approves Gilead drug
A new twice-yearly shot could be a "game changer" in the fight against AIDS, but experts' hopes have dimmed because of the current political climate.
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Daniel Hurdiss @danielhurdiss.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
Latest preprint from the lab, many years in the making! By combining #cryoEM with #AlphaFold3 modelling, we propose that norovirus NS3 forms a transmembrane RNA translocase. This could have big implications for our understanding of viral replication & assembly (🧵) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Nature @nature.com · 16/06/2025
Proteins operate on a short timescale — on the order of a millisecond, or even faster go.nature.com/4l7qAEm
go.nature.com
Freeze frame: cracking molecular motion
Time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy can resolve protein motion on millisecond or even microsecond timescales, but the need for highly specialized tools and skills limits the method’s reach.
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Charlie Scarff @scarfflab.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
3.5 yr funded PhD studentship available in my lab October start. Exploring cardiac myosin modulators with cryoEM and mass spec. Get in touch if interested. Apply before 28th July. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
findaphd.com
Unravelling the mechanisms of action of cardiac myosin modulators in health and heart disease at University of Leeds on FindAPhD.com
PhD Project - Unravelling the mechanisms of action of cardiac myosin modulators in health and heart disease at University of Leeds, listed on FindAPhD.com
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Iso Hirst @isobelhirst.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
I’m very happy to share my first paper on the effects of AWI interactions and flexibility on SPA data quality! Thank you to everyone on the team 🤩 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Untangling the effects of flexibility and the AWI in cryoEM sample preparation: A case study using KtrA
Single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM) is a powerful tool for elucidating the structures of biological macromolecules without requiring cry…
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Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia.bsky.social · 14/05/2025
"I am hesitant to comment broadly on what it’s like for scientists now in America because I have only limited information about what is going on outside of this detention center. What I do know is that my colleagues, many of whom are, like me, foreign scientists, are terrified"
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Brady Johnston @bradyajohnston.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
Okay hear me out, what if building your protein model was a first person horror survival experience?? #MolecularNodes #b3d #GeometryNodes 🧪
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Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan @london.gov.uk · 28/04/2025
Young Londoners deserve opportunities across the EU. A youth mobility scheme would strengthen ties with our neighbours, boost our economy and open doors for the next generation at a time of global uncertainty.
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Astbury Biostructure Laboratory @astbury-bsl.bsky.social · 25/04/2025
Exciting to see our time-resolved #cryoEM device developed by @stemuench.bsky.social & colleagues in action at the CCPEM Spring Symposium! Brilliant talk by @scarfflab.bsky.social showing how it helped to visualize the elusive actomyosin primed complex & demonstrate the swinging lever mechanism.
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Astbury Biostructure Laboratory @astbury-bsl.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
Huge shout out to @jenkinsjj.bsky.social for his excellent talk on the #cryoET structure of Tau filaments from human brain tissue at CCPEM Spring Symposium in Nottingham! #cryo-EM @diamondlightsource.bsky.social @ccpem.bsky.social
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Michael Webster @michaelwebster.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
Thank you for this whole thread!🙏 I occasionally worry I invest too much time making figures, but this one post makes 100s of hours seem worth it!
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Joachim Frank @joachim123.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
Diversity: www.albany.edu/offcourse/is...
albany.edu
Offcourse #100 March 2025 "Diversity" by Joachim Frank
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Sonja Welsch @sonjawelsch.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
In case you wondered what it looks like "in real life" when the FluScreen of a Krios cryoEM is retracted/inserted: here you go. ❄️🔬
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Janelia Research Campus @hhmijanelia.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
📢 Submissions are now open for the CellMap Segmentation Challenge. Build the best method for segmenting cellular organelles in vEM using our 289 annotated volumes, 40 organelle classes, and 22 diverse cell and tissue types. 🔗 hhmi.news/410evJQ
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Iso Hirst @isobelhirst.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
Saw some cows and sheep doing a kind pseudosymmetry thing on my run the other day 😊
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Beck Laboratory @becklab.bsky.social · 17/01/2025
In a great collaboration with @hummerlab.bsky.social and the Kräusslich lab: HIV capsid doesn't break at the NPC; instead, it cracks open the NPC itself! Details in Cell: authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S... @mpibp.bsky.social @uniheidelberg.bsky.social A thread below:
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Iso Hirst @isobelhirst.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Check out this brand new album from Berlin-based punk-ska band Dafffke out now on your favourite music streaming platform 🤩🤩 some motivational political music to get you in the Xmas spirit 😎
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Keishu Asada @cephwarden.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
Nudibranch cruising like a ship over a grainy sea
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Kevin A. Scott, PhD @sculpturatus.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
AlphaFold3 still tends to overfit regions that AF2 multimer predicts to be disordered. Almost all disordered regions become helices in AF3.
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Anthony Ricciardi @ecoinvasions.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Quote: "It is very hard to interpret big data in ecology in meaningful ways if you do not know anything about who the organisms are and what they do in the environment." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
A place for natural history in the 21st century
Natural history provides an important basis for observing interactions between organisms in their environments. Biotropica recently inaugurated a new paper category called “Natural History Field Note....
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Iso Hirst @isobelhirst.bsky.social · 15/12/2024
Pleased to share that Foteini and I each got second place for our talks at the White Rose DTP Winter Symposium! Foteini about her placement at Yorkshire Cancer Research and me about some research on sample preparation for #cryoem 🥳
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Lucas Farnung @lucas.farnunglab.com · 12/12/2024
Ever wondered how transcription choreographs histone modifications? Our work reveals the basis of co-transcriptional H3K36me3 by SETD2. We visualize how a histone writer coordinates with the transcription machinery! This is the magnus opus of @jonmarkert.bsky.social! tinyurl.com/setd2
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Loïc A. Royer 💻🔬🧪 @loicaroyer.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
The birth of fruit fly's central nervous system imaged with multicolor #adaptive #lightsheet microscopy. The microscope self-aligns to a signal that appears during imaging. www.nature.com/articles/nbt...
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Benjamin Brigant, PhD @crisprandbeyond.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
🌍🧪 Want to do something different and have fun? Try Skype a Scientist! It's an amazing chance to connect with a classroom anywhere in the world 🌎 and share your journey as a scientist. 👩‍🔬 The new 2025 volunteer form is out 🥳 Let’s inspire the next generation! 💡✨ #PhDSky #AcademicSky #MedSky
skypeascientist.com
SKYPE A SCIENTIST
Skype a Scientist matches your classroom, scout troop, or library with scientists for Q&A sessions for free!
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chrisvanhoorn.bsky.social @chrisvanhoorn.bsky.social · 08/12/2024
Our #CryoET paper on ciliary rootlet ultrastructure from mouse retina is now out in @elife.bsky.social! Have a peek with this video or dive deeper at bit.ly/3ZJzhgc. Big thanks to @carter-lab.bsky.social and #teamtomo. #CryoET #CryoEM #Cilia #Rootlet #Centriole #Research #Science
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Rémi Fronzes @fronzeslab.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Beautiful !
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Science News @scinews.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results @natureportfolio.bsky.social "The researchers say this highlights their potential as powerful tools for accelerating research, going far beyond just knowledge retrieval." Open Access www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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amohr @amohr.org · 28/11/2024
Cladonia, a lichenized fungus, seems almost otherworldly sometimes. 🍄📷 #fungifriends #lichen #macrophotography
Roughly textured pale verdigris stalks bend upward from a tree's bark. At the tips are tiny crimson mushroom caps.
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RCSB Protein Data Bank @rcsbpdb.bsky.social · 01/12/2024
PDB structures of HIV molecules provide hope for development of new vaccines and methods to rid an infected individual of the latent virus. #WorldAIDSDay pdb101.rcsb.org/brow...
pdb101.rcsb.org
PDB101: Browse: HIV and AIDS
PDB-101: Training, Outreach, and Education portal of RCSB PDB
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Drew Berry wehi.tv @drewberry.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
Happy Holliday Junction for those who celebrate
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Dr. Marissa Civic @stemfactually.com · 29/11/2024
I am so excited for the #Christmas season. I want to do a #podcast episode for #kids about the #science of the #holidays. I would love to hear some ideas from #parents about what intrigues your kids the most. What are the holiday "why" questions you hear every year? I'd enjoy answering them. 👩‍🔬🍎🥽🧪❄️
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