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Jackson Cahn

@jkbcahn.bsky.social
385 followers 400 following 134 posts

Learning from evolution to make drugs with enzymes.

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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
For a brief moment in maybe 2014 you could get chicken and waffle flavored Lay's potato chips, and they were *incredible*.
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
People who want to see him live long enough to face trial.
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Enzyme Papers @biocat-papers.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Biomimetic Base-Exchange Reaction for Late-Stage Synthesis of Stereodivergent NAADP + and NAD(P) + Derivatives
pubs.acs.org
Biomimetic Base-Exchange Reaction for Late-Stage Synthesis of Stereodivergent NAADP+ and NAD(P)+ Derivatives
Abstract. Nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NAADP+) and related NAD(P)+ analogues are important tools for calcium signaling, redox biology, an
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In Preparation @inprep.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
inpreparation.substack.com
Tech Who Can Pipette 384-Well Plate While Carrying On Full Conversation Regarded As God Among Men
COLLEGE STATION, TX — Sources across the Varma laboratory at Texas A&M University confirmed Monday that research technician Marcus Cole, 28, who can accurately pipette an entire 384-well plate while…
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Paradisi Research @paradisireslab.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
J. Chem Ed (2026): "Introducing Enzyme Immobilization and Flow Biocatalysis to the Undergraduate Curriculum" paradisiresearch.com/research-highl…
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 13/07/2026
Trump on Lindsey Graham: "He had one bad moment in the January 6 thing when he stood up -- 'alright, now I've had it, that's it, I can't do it anymore' -- then he called me about 40 minutes later and said, 'Did I really said that? I can't believe it.' And he took it back."
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Bethany Brookshire @beebrookshire.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
You may have heard about the OMB rule change that will put politics over federal grants. However bad you think it is? It's probably worse. Thanks to @theverge.com for letting me report this one out. There is still time to comment. bit.ly/4v2X4nQ
bit.ly
The war against ‘woke’ could end US science as we know it
“Everyone will be affected, not just scientists. Every community in the country.“
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Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
One prominent group has been totally silent about the Trump administration’s latest attempt to grab control of all federal science funding. That’s the biopharma companies, and their suddenly shy, quiet CEOs. Here’s the calculation they’re making:
science.org
Speaking Up: Who Is, and Who Isn't
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
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Paco Cardenas @paccardenas.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
Two new activities for #barettin, extracted from my pet sponge 'Geodia barretti' : promising activity against 1) chronic pain and 2) the most common and aggressive type of pancreatic cancer! Two papers from the Cartmell Lab👇 www.mdpi.com/1660-3397/24... doi.org/10.1021/acs....
doi.org
Barettin, a Nonopioid, Nonhallucinogenic Marine Natural Product with Antihyperalgesic Properties Mediated by 5HT2A Inverse Agonism
Despite increasing interest, there remain limited treatments for chronic pain, with opioids continuing to be one of the top prescribed medications. Marine natural products present a wealth of untapped potential for new treatments for chronic pain. In this study, we investigated the analgesic effects of the sea sponge ligand barettin in a mouse model of chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN). Barettin exhibited efficacious antihyperalgesic activity in male mice with no efficacy shown in females. Through the use of a PRESTO-Tango assay, we found that barettin acts as an inverse agonist at the 5HT2A receptor while also presenting no activity at the μ-opioid receptor. Head twitch experiments confirmed no hallucinogenic activity, suggesting that barettin may be a promising nonopioid, nonhallucinogenic, marine-derived therapeutic agent for the treatment of chronic pain.
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Scott Bagley @bagphos.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Biocatalysis! Process chem! Job! #PfizerChemistry is hiring! PhD 0-5 years exp #ChemJobs #ChemSky
pfizer.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
Senior Scientist, Process Development
Use Your Power for Purpose We are seeking a creative, highly motivated chemist with experience in biocatalysis to join Chemical Research and Development (CRD) in Groton, Connecticut. The successful ca...
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
The reviews raise real issues, but also understand the structure of the paper and why different readers would (and wouldn't) appreciate different aspects. The science is spot on, including having context that we don't mention in the paper. The world is changing, really fast.
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
We're about to submit a paper and my collaborator fed it into an LLM and asked for critical reviews from numerous perspectives: subject matter experts in each technique, a journal editor, copy-writer, graphic designer... To be honest I've never gotten more helpful feedback from my actual peers.
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Kirk Hovenkotter @kirkhovenkotter.com · 04/06/2026
In just 17 years, Seattle went from not having light rail to having the most ridden system in the nation. We’ve proven how leadership & investment can change a city and people’s lives for the better
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
best* known
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
This is insane. Pulte is the failson of a major RE developer, and before 2025 was next known as a memestock conspiracist. At FHA, he's been responsible for scrutinizing the mortgage applications of Trump critics to find "crimes". Clearly that's what Trump wants US intelligence services working on.
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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 29/05/2026
This is bad. Bad for researchers. Bad for science. Bad for universities. Bad for professional associations. For example: 1. Every award would be vetted by political appointees, who could overrule peer reviewers and deny the award if it doesn't advance the president's priorities. 1/🧵
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Tristan A.F. Long @thelonglab.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Big, if true! @jrossibarra.bsky.social 😹🪰🌽
Close up on an AI slop Phylogenetic tree where fly is nested within a clade that is mostly plants (and a yeast too for some dumb reason)
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
The people of Kentucky sent a clear message to the nation tonight: the Epstein files should stay buried and no one implicated should face any consequences.
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Found a legitimate exception to "Vote Blue No Matter Who"
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
Deep cut. Respect.
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
bsky.app/profile/matt...
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Sorry, but this is dumb. The limiting factor for these weapons is not the design of new agents. Chemical structures are known, viral genomes are published. The bottlenecks are manufacturing, formulation, and delivery, where AI isn't particularly advantaged.
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Lisa Jarvis @lisamjarvis.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Marty Makary might be out at FDA (a welcome development, to be sure), but there's no easy path back to normalcy -- especially when the political pressures on the agency aren't going anywhere. My latest for @opinion.bloomberg.com:
bloomberg.com
Makary Is Out, But the FDA Is Still Far From Normal
In an ideal world, this week’s resignation of Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary would signal the end of a troubling period at the agency — one where the job of overseeing a sizabl...
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
This is basically harassment of scholars willing to question the Trump administration’s targeting of Chinese colleagues. Innes already had the FBI investigate his lab and was given the all clear. Now USDA is shutting down the Lab, which focuses on making fungus-resistant plants.
IU plant microbiologist Roger Innes says the move Thursday evening is the latest instance of retaliation for a letter he wrote last fall on behalf of Yunqing Jian, a plant scientist postdoc at the University of Michigan who had pled guilty to smuggling biological material and making false statements. The letter to Jian's attorney, intended to be used at her sentencing, argued that what the Chinese postdoc had transported was not dangerous, but she was still ultimately deported.
Her conviction triggered an investigation of Youhuang Xiang, a Chinese postdoc in Innes' lab, that led to Xiang also pleading guilty last month to smuggling loops of DNA known as plasmids. He was also deported.
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Derek Hennen, Ph.D. @derekhennen.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
You should be able to criticize the government for its racism and not have your chickenshit employer take the side of the racists.
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
Instead of assembling a peptide with traditional chemical approaches, we engineered a number of enzymes to do new chemistry and build it for us. Here's a good summary: cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic...
cen.acs.org
Chemical & Engineering News
Chemical & Engineering News is a weekly news magazine published by the American Chemical Society, providing professional and technical news and analysis in the fields of chemistry and chemical enginee...
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Bethany Halford @bethanyhalford.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
Biocatalysts can build big molecules. A team at Merck & Co. developed a suite of enzymes that stitch together their oral PCSK9 inhibitor enlicitide. My latest for @cenmag.bsky.social cen.acs.org/pharmaceutic... #chemsky
Chemical structure of enlicitide
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
Instead, we turned to biocatalysis, repurposing and radically reengineering ~ a dozen enzymes to build this molecule across three reaction cascades This took a lot of people (136 authors!) and many years, and I'm so excited for the broader biocatalysis community to see what we've been up to!
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
This is the big one! So proud to have played a part on this team. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Enlicitide is an exciting potential molecule for cardiovascular disease, but if we were going to make it on a commercial scale, existing chemical techniques just weren't going to cut it.
science.org
Biocatalytic cascades enable manufacture of the macrocyclic peptide enlicitide
Historically, many compelling therapeutic targets have been accessible only by injectable biologic drugs. Macrocyclic peptides, such as the proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 inhibitor enli...
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
We should fucking riot www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/u...
nytimes.com
F.D.A. Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Are these both measurements of the same underlying property, which we call thermostability? Or are these measuring two different properties? And if so, how tightly correlated are they?
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Let’s say you have 100 enzymes and you perform two experiments: 1) Each is subjected to a 1hr heat challenge in buffer, then cooled to RT and the residual activity is measured. 2) Each enzyme is run at an elevated reaction temperature and the enzyme’s half-life is measured.
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Help me think this through, what *is* protein thermostability?
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Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Like most drug discovery researchers, I’ve been watching the “peptides for everything” craze with a mixture of amusement and alarm:
science.org
Ah, Peptides. Where to Begin?
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
When I spend all day in meetings
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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
All the worst cunts in the world - from journalism to politics, the Kermlin to the White House - are suffering tonight.
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
#nokings #nokingsnj #nokingsdenville
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much like your ghosting @mlyp.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
Perfect
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
Tagging Gov @mikiesherrill.bsky.social
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
We don't always win the Super Bowl, but when we do we absolutely humiliate the other team #12
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
We're sliding into a polio-ridden runaway-warming white-supremacist fascist dystopia. But Jake Bobo just caught a touchdown pass and that still makes me happy.
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Jackson Cahn @jkbcahn.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
"Who would bring a gun to a protest?" mfs when they're the ones protesting.
Heavily armed conservative protesters at the Michigan state capitol in April 2020.
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Cascadia(PNW) @cascadiarevolting.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
FYI: Seattle #ICE #ICEWATCH
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Philip Bump @pbump.com · 24/01/2026
Just staggered by the complete moral void of not even *pretending* to wait for more information before pivoting to “the opponent of the state deserved it.” It is so insanely depraved. Soulless.
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Bill Childs @billchilds.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
“Federal agents briefly detained our reporter at the scene, who says he was tackled to the ground and had a gun put in his face.”
bringmethenews.com
BREAKING: Federal agent shoots man in south Minneapolis
A Bring Me The News reporter was near the scene, and recorded multiple gunshots.
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Sanjay Srivastava @sanjaysrivastava.com · 18/01/2026
The Seahawks defense was so dominant that the team scored 41 points and everyone's like "the offense did ok too I guess"
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Jeremy Baskin @jeremybaskin.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
9. Directed evolution campaigns yield new lipid-binding domains from a variety of protein scaffold precursors, from @takinishimura.bsky.social and Noboru Mizushima, on @biorxiv-cellbio.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Rational engineering of lipid-binding probes via high-throughput protein-lipid interaction screening
Lipid-binding domains, originally isolated from natural proteins, are useful tools essential for analyzing membrane lipids in cells, and their applications are varied. Yet, there is no general strateg...
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
amazing how the entire machine can pivot within 24 hours. no need to slowly upsell the argument; just issue new marching orders
Matt Walsh tweeted last year: "We've spent the last 25 years bringing "freedom" and "democracy" to countries around the globe while our own country has been systematically invaded and now our largest cities are run by foreigners and communists. If you want to know why I'm so avowedly non-interventionist, this is why."

Then he tweeted today: ""This is a war for oil!!!!!"

First of all, the "war" lasted like 90 minutes. Second, going to war to secure vital resources for your own people is totally legitimate. Why should we allow some third world communist shithole to control trillions of dollars worth of oil?"Laura Loomer tweeted last year: "I’m America First, I don’t support “Regime Change”. I went on @Bannons_WarRoom to talk about Chinese aggression in Venezuela and why we need to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign Islamic terrorist organization."

Then she tweeted yesterday: "Maduro has arrived at the DEA office in Manhattan. He was transported in an armored motorcade after being transported in a blindfold via helicopter & then by plane to New York after his compound in Caracas was raided by US Special Forces.

Proud to be an American today!

USA 🇺🇸"Catturd tweeted last year: "Name one U.S. inspired regime change that hasn’t ended in absolute disaster."

Then he tweeted yesterday: "Venezuela is now more free than New York City."Will Chamberlain tweeted last year: "The Republican Party is no longer the party of regime change and endless wars

If you want to be its standard-bearer that is a non-negotiable position"

Then he tweeted yesterday: "I can think of few better uses of my tax dollars than black-bagging the head of a foreign narco-trafficking organization that enriches itself by addicting and poisoning my fellow Americans"
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leon @leyawn.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
this is your mission. our pedophile president needs you to jump out of a helicopter to kidnap a head of state and his wife so some oil ceos can make a lot of money. we’ll be watching from a resort in florida that still serves wedge salad and checking how many retweets we get. good luck soldier
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