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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧

@randyjread.bsky.social
1.7K followers 169 following 93 posts

Interested in likelihood-based methods for structural biology. Contributor to Phenix, CCP4 and CCP-EM. Based at CIMR, University of Cambridge. Posts usually about science.

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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Structural Biology @actacrystd.iucr.org · 17/09/2026
Scotty can also be used to perform a PDB-wide analysis of lattice coincidences. The results demonstrate that lattice-level analysis provides a valuable perspective on macromolecular self-association. #Nonisomorphism #PDBAnnotation #Oligomerization doi.org/10.1107/S205...
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Structural Biology @actacrystd.iucr.org · 16/09/2026
Scotty can rapidly scan a metric-space index of the PDB archive for closely and distantly related crystal forms and will serve to rapidly phase these structures by difference FFT #Nonisomorphism #NiggliCell #CrystallographicContaminants doi.org/10.1107/S205...
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Janani Durairaj (Jay) @ninjani.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The PhD and Postdoc application links are now live! Come join me at UNIL to work on deep learning for protein structure, interactions & design. pickybinders.org#open-positions
career5.successfactors.eu
Career Opportunities: PhD student position in deep learning for enzyme structure & catalysis (22980)
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I’m looking forward to seeing what your new group gets up to!
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
This is really highly deserved for all of her seminal contributions!
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Chris H. Hill @chillzaa.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Thrilled to share that our paper describing protein-dependent frameshifting is now out in Molecular Cell @cellpress.bsky.social. Huge congratulations to @jemmabetts.bsky.social for publishing the first research paper from her PhD 🧬🧪🥳 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/8
sciencedirect.com
A protein-dependent riboswitch activates ribosomal frameshifting in cardioviruses
Programmed −1 ribosomal frameshifting (PRF) is a translational control mechanism used by RNA viruses to regulate the relative abundance of proteins en…
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Cambridge Institute for Medical Research @thecimr.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Delighted to be hosting the MRC Centre of Research Excellence in Mitochondrial Genome Therapeutics from Apr '27; bringing together global experts in mitochondrial disease & clinical translation to improve patient outcomes for devastating mitochondrial DNA diseases. www.cimr.cam.ac.uk/news/mrc-cen...
Con-focal microscopy image of mitochondria
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Fantastic, congratulations!
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
I’ve interacted with Karissa (@sanbonmatsu.bsky.social) at Phenix workshops, and it’s great to see this recognition!
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
If you're a UK scientist depending on national facilities like Diamond Light Source, please consider signing this letter! openletter.earth/open-letter-...
openletter.earth
Open Letter in Response to Funding Pressures Affecting Diamond Light Source
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Aafke Gros @aafkegros.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Microscopy Nodes 3.1 is out for Blender 5.2! 🎉 This has cool new features for conditional masking, working with even larger data (regional upscaling), and data manipulation! Watch the new youtube tutorials that explain the features: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
A FIB-SEM plankton visualization where the top shows only the volumetric data of the chromosomes, and the bottom a normally sliced region of the cell. A fluorescence microscopy dataset where a region has been reloaded to be much higher resolution
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Get back in your sandbox, HAL.
bbc.co.uk
OpenAI says its AI went rogue and launched 'unprecedented' cyber-attack
It is one of the first publicly disclosed cyber-attacks carried out by AI without direct human involvement.
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Alisia Fadini @alisiafadini.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Atomic models powered bioAI's first era. Experiments measure more. @rs-station.bsky.social is joining omsf.io to unlock interpretation of raw exp observables at scale (blog👇); we'll partner with @openfold.io, @openbind.bsky.social , and cryo-EM+X-ray facilities to make this routine. Join us!
omsf.io
Open Molecular Software Foundation
Making bonds Building open source software and communities for the molecular sciences.
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 17/07/2026
Editor in Chief of Science: AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive.
doi.org
AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive
There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Alt...
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
My favourite announcement was: “This train has been cancelled due to a late change in the schedule”.
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Structural Biology @actacrystd.iucr.org · 07/07/2026
July issue now available: journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... The cover highlights Scotty, a tool within the Phasertng codebase that leverages Niggli-cell matches to identify similar crystallographic lattices and perform phasing with difference Fourier methods. Read more at doi.org/10.1107/S205...
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Congratulations!
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Both the Hoodoos in the local landscape of Drumheller and the Tyrrell Museum are amazing!
Sandstone formations called Hoodoos.
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Structural Biology @actacrystd.iucr.org · 02/06/2026
Our June issue is now available! journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... The cover highlights a new fusion tool that has been developed to enable the structure determination of G protein-coupled receptors in inactive conformations by cryo-EM. Find out more at doi.org/10.1107/S205...
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Briggs Group @briggsgroup.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
The architecture of carriers formed by AP3:ARF1 for lysosomal membrane protein transport: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... Work from @jggkaufman.bsky.social, in collaboration with @dgershlick.bsky.social and David Owen. @mpibiochem.bsky.social @thecimr.bsky.social
science.org
Architecture of clathrin-independent AP3:ARF1-coated carriers
AP3 generates clathrin-free carriers on endosomes by organizing via ARF1 dimers into elongated membrane-deforming arrays.
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Yes, there are several related contaminant lists that are mostly aimed at crystallography. The original is ContaMiner (strube.cbrc.kaust.edu.sa/contaminer/c...) and there are lists underlying SIMBAD in CCP4 and, recently, phasertng.changeling (Phenix, soon CCP4). A list for cryoEM would be great!
strube.cbrc.kaust.edu.sa
ContaMiner
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Bijvoet Centre @bijvoet-centre.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
We are excited to be at our annual Bijvoet Symposium today, for a day filled with exciting structural biology presented by our PhD students and postdocs!
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Structural Biology @actacrystd.iucr.org · 06/05/2026
Take a look at the May issue: journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... On the cover: radiation damage to bound ligands in the active site of urate oxidase at 100 K and room temperature - find out more at journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202...
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
Great places to visit, and Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is as memorable as its name!
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
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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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
School of Biological Sciences @cambridgebiosci.bsky.social · 22/04/2026
An international team of researchers, including scientists from the University of Cambridge, has identified a new way coronaviruses can enter human cells. 🦠 Prof Stephen Graham explains why this breakthrough matters for future health risks. Read more 👉 www.cam.ac.uk/research/new...
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Alisia Fadini @alisiafadini.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
Access alternate functional conformations encoded in AlphaFold’s latent space in a few GPU minutes 👇 We also introduce a novel supervised transfer task: train once on a source (GPCR/kinase/transporter) and apply across the family. Work led by Minji!
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
The more challenging targets CASP gets, the more the structural biology community will learn!
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Melanie I Stefan @melanieistefan.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
So, OpenAI, whose entire business model relies on some overhyped dudebros using vast amounts of stolen data and stolen labour, is releasing a specialised GPT for the life sciences. And naming it, apparently without any sense of irony or self-awareness. Rosalind.
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
John Rubinstein @johnrubinstein.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Sad news on the passing of Prof. Andreas Engel, a pioneer in the field of cryo-EM (shared with the 3DEM community by Henning Stahlberg). Andreas' kindness, warmth, and enthusiasm for science and his colleagues will be missed.
Dear colleagues,
With deep sadness I share the news that Andreas Engel passed away last Wednesday, at the age of 82, after a courageous fight against an aggressive caner. Only half a year ago, he was out hiking in the Italian mountains with his wife Barbara, walking 160 km in a single week. 
Andreas trained as a physicist in Bern, Switzerland, before heading to John Hopkins University in Baltimore for his postdoctoral work. He then led a research group at the Biozentrum in Basel, and in 1985 took on the role of a group leader in research and development at Ilford Ltd. in Fribourg, Switzerland.
In 1987, he joined forces with his colleague Ueli Aebi to establish the Maurice E. Müller Institute at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. Together, Ueli and Andreas served as professors for structural biology there for almost a quarter century, leaving a lasting mark on the field of structural biology as we know it today.
 
Andreas Engel was a true pioneer. He was among the first to apply atomic force microscopy (AFM) with the tip operating under water, and one of the earliest researchers to perform 3D reconstructions using scanning transmission electron microscopy, achieving remarkable high-resolution maps of porin 2D crystals by STEM. He became a leading expert in membrane protein 2D crystallization, and his group played a key role in the determination of the first aquaporin structure, in collaboration with Peter Agre and Yoshinori Fujiyoshi. 
As he approached retirement from Basel, Andreas founded the Center for Cellular Imaging and NanoAnalytics (C-CINA) of the University of Basel, which in 2009 operated among others one of the very early Titan Krios instruments. From 2008 also held a professorship at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, followed by a position at TU Delft in the Netherlands in 2013. In 2020, he was among the founding members of CryoWrite, a company in Basel that he led as CEO until recently. 
His contributions to science, to the tools of str…Photo of Andreas Engel
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Hekstra Lab @hekstralab.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
We're a big step closer to automated determination of protein structures. The key? Having AlphaFold listen to experimental data. Great work, led by @alisiafadini.bsky.social and @minhuanli.bsky.social in an inspiring collaboration with @moalquraishi.bsky.social and @randyjread.bsky.social.
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Minhuan Li @minhuanli.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
ROCKET came out on Nature Methods today. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to translate a research concept into a practical tool—one that researchers can seamlessly drop into their existing pipelines. We learned a lot along the path and will carry that spirit forward.
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Exciting to see the final form of this great work out in print!
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Mohammed AlQuraishi @moalquraishi.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
Our heavily updated final version of ROCKET for experiment-guided structure modeling is out in @naturemethods! New frontiers like high-throughput fragment screening and mid-res tomography are forcing a rethink of how experiments are modeled. ROCKET+OpenFold proposes a solution👇
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Luca Jovine @jovinelab.org · 01/04/2026
Very happy to have had a chance to attack an initially very low-resolution #cryo-EM map with #ROCKET! Thank you again @alisiafadini.bsky.social and all other co-authors of this important work, which truly shows the power of combining experimental structural biology and #AI inference. rdcu.be/fa9YH
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Luca Jovine @jovinelab.org · 01/04/2026
Starting from an #AlphaFold-Multimer prediction, we used #ROCKET to build a model of ZPD, a homopolymeric zona pellucida (#ZP) protein, into an initial #cryo-EM map at only ~9 Å resolution. A subsequently obtained 4.6 Å map highlighted how superior the ROCKET model was over the initial prediction:
ROCKET enables model building of a ZPD filament from low-resolution cryo-EM
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Minhuan Li @minhuanli.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
It was a fantastic trip and a pleasure talking with the Pfizer team 😄 One highlight was discovering they’ve built a web GUI for ROCKET to make it more accessible—I’m thrilled (and even a bit surprised) to see how our tool helping people solve real-world problems.
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Mohammed AlQuraishi @moalquraishi.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
New OpenFold3 preview out! (OF3p2) It closes the gap to AlphaFold3 for most modalities. Most critically, we're releasing everything, including training sets & configs, making OF3p2 the only current AF3-based model that is functionally trainable & reproducible from scratch🧵1/9
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Alisia Fadini @alisiafadini.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
After an Amtrak coding session with @minhuanli.bsky.social, ROCKET team is back at @rs-station.bsky.social HQ! Thank you to Pfizer for welcoming us in Groton and to everyone who attended our seminar online. Exciting work ahead to continue exploring frontiers in structure determination. Back to it 🚀
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Structural Biology @actacrystd.iucr.org · 09/03/2026
Take a look at our March issue: journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... On the cover: the response of two paradigmatic metalloproteins of different types, one iron-containing and one copper-containing, to X-ray-induced metal reduction at cryo- and room temperature journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202...
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
worbenny.bsky.social @worbenny.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
The @thecimr.bsky.social and MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit are celebrating "Rare Research Day" TODAY! By creating factsheets on how their work contributes to greater understanding and potential treatments. #RareDiseaseDay #ShareYourColours #RareDiseaseDay2026 #UniversityofCambridge
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
I find Airlie’s composite self rotation representation much easier to interpret. Check it out!
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Wendy Bickmore @wbickmor.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
At a time when the UK should be capitalising on its global reputation as a great place to do science, this is an enormous own goal. I am so sorry for all those who jobs are going to be impacted.
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Rob Fagan @robfagan.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
Finally comms from UKRI - on a Sunday evening. No mention of the hundreds of ECRs who will see their careers ended by these decisions and notably no explanation for MRC retrospectively applying cuts and wasting all the work that went into writing, reviewing and scoring applications - £millions
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Missed it, thanks for pointing it out!
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Karolin Luger @nucleosomepolice.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
My hero!!! An amazing scientist and a wonderful person!
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Stefan Marciniak @profmarciniak.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
Has the MRC research funding ‘pause’ been covered by any major news network? It feels like it should be a major news story
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Cambridge Institute for Medical Research @thecimr.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
We have a fantastic opportunity for a PhD studentship in collaboration with @jesuscollegecam.bsky.social and Cambridge Children’s Research Institute, part of the new Cambridge Children’s Hospital. Closing date 20th Feb; all the details here: www.cimr.cam.ac.uk/postgraduate...
cimr.cam.ac.uk
The Chi-Wang PhD Studentship at Jesus College and the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine | Cambridge Institute for Medical Research
The Chi-Wang Studentship at Jesus College and the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine. Funding Application deadline: 23:59pm (midnight) UK time on 20th February 2026.
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Reposted by Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧
Alexis Rohou @alexisrohou.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
She continues to be a lively presence at structural biology meetings. And for my money has the deepest, most intuitive understanding of protein geometry. A treasure.
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Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧 @randyjread.bsky.social · 09/01/2026
By the way, this is by the @alisiafadini.bsky.social behind ROCKET!
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