Reposted by Michael WestbergNobel Prize @nobelprize.org · 16hBREAKING NEWS The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.” 16968474
Reposted by Michael WestbergMichael Lin, MD PhD @michaelzlin.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Excited to share a new study from our lab in Cell: “Non-invasive control of gene editing in vivo by photoswitchable Cas12f and focused ultrasound” We engineered a compact CRISPR system that can be activated at specific locations in the body using focused ultrasound (🧵) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...cell.comNon-invasive control of gene editing in vivo by photoswitchable Cas12f and focused ultrasoundRemote activation of a single-AAV-deliverable photoswitchable Cas12f system enables precise spatial and temporal control of genome editing in deep tissues without surgery or implanted devices. 13710
Reposted by Michael WestbergSergey Ovchinnikov @sokrypton.org · 15/08/2026Try for your protein at py2dmol.solab.org (Style → Cartoon) 35214
Reposted by Michael WestbergKresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 23/06/2026Come join the new Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Design as a group leader Cool science in a great scientific environment in wonderful and very family friendly Copenhagen There are two positions that can either be at TT assistant or associate prof level employment.ku.dk/tenure-track...employment.ku.dkTenure-track Assistant Professor or Associate Professor of De novo Protein DesignThe Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Design at the University of Copenhagen seeks to appoint two new group leaders in de novo protein design from 1 February 2027 or as soon as possible thereafter. These positions will be at the Assistant or Associate Professor level and associated with the Department of Biology (Faculty of Science) or the Department of Drug Design and Pharmacology (Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences). 25363
Reposted by Michael WestbergReese Richardson @reeserichardson.bsky.social · 05/06/2026The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below) 18590367
Reposted by Michael WestbergJoachim Goedhart @joachimgoedhart.bsky.social · 14/10/2025Periodic reminder that the fluorescent compound in mammalian cell culture media, such as DMEM, is riboflavin (not phenol red) 24210
Reposted by Michael WestbergKresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 12/09/2025I’m biased 🇩🇰, but this is quite nice to read: I thought science hinged on prestige. Moving abroad made me reassess my priorities www.science.org/content/arti...science.orgI thought science hinged on prestige. Moving abroad made me reassess my prioritiesIn Denmark, this Ph.D. student fell in love with an egalitarian society that values work-life balance 24412
Reposted by Michael WestbergAlexey Amunts @amunts.bsky.social · 04/07/2025Speak up to prevent a major loss for the field. CASP, which helped shaping structural biology including AlphaFold is on the verge of shutting down. NIH funding has lapsed, UC Davis support ends and the core team is being let go. Painfully shortsighted.science.orgExclusive: Famed protein structure competition nears end as NIH grant money runs outAgency silent on funding renewal for contest that inspired creation of AIs that predicted how proteins would fold 06546
Reposted by Michael Westbergboehninglab @boehninglab.com · 02/05/2025Budget released today: 40% cut to NIH 50% cut to NSF If enacted, this will destroy academic research in the United States. It will also have a major trickle down effect on the entire academic ecosystem 18576243
Reposted by Michael WestbergNick Polizzi @nickpolizzi.bsky.social · 28/04/2025Super excited to share a new preprint from our lab on design of small-molecule binding proteins using neural networks! The paper has a bit of everything. A new graph neural network, new design algorithms, and experimental validation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵🧪biorxiv.orgZero-shot design of drug-binding proteins via neural selection-expansionComputational design of molecular recognition remains challenging despite advances in deep learning. The design of proteins that bind to small molecules has been particularly difficult because it requ... 25523
Reposted by Michael WestbergGabriel Rocklin @grocklin.bsky.social · 26/03/2025Small proteins can be more complex than they look! We know proteins fluctuate between different conformations- but by how much? How does it vary from protein to protein? Can highly stable domains have low stability segments? @ajrferrari.bsky.social experimentally tested >5,000 domains to find out! 48736
Reposted by Michael WestbergYan Matusevich @ymatusik.bsky.social · 07/03/2025Just got an email from the Fulbright Association. As of right now, funding has been cut off to 12,500 US citizens currently abroad and and more than 7,400 foreigner scholars and students in the United States 20362203211
Michael Westberg @westberglab.com · 07/03/2025We are looking for a postdoc with an interdisciplinary drive to join our team at Aarhus University. The project, funded by the Villum Foundation, focuses on leveraging recent advances in de novo protein design to develop novel photoactive proteins.international.au.dkPostdoc in Protein Design of Photoactive Proteins - Vacancy at Aarhus UniversityVacancy at Chemistry, Dept. of, Aarhus University 290
Reposted by Michael WestbergMatthew Sinton 🏳️🌈 @mcsinton.bsky.social · 04/03/2025Are you serious @royalsociety.org?? He is trying to destroy science, spreading dangerous misinformation, inciting violence & your response is to do nothing? So what’s your purpose then? What do you exist for? Other than being elite? 🧪 #academicsky www.theguardian.com/technology/2...theguardian.comElon Musk survives as fellow of Royal Society despite anger among scientistsQuestions remain over whether further action will be taken after resignations and calls for the Tesla CEO to be expelled 14354108
Reposted by Michael WestbergLuke Lavis @rhodamine110.bsky.social · 01/03/2025Hey #chemsky and beyond, with all that is going on, I am curious what expensive, high margin molecules we could provide to the community for free. What things do you use all the time, cost way too much, and would make a difference? Alexa Fluor 488 NHS? Other dyes? Other molecule? 76830
Reposted by Michael WestbergMichael Bang Petersen @m-b-petersen.bsky.social · 11/02/2025Instruktøren for kryolit-dokumentaren tager til genmæle i P1 Orientering - men svarene er langt fra overbevisende: www.dr.dk/lyd/p1/p1-or... For mig at se er dokumentaren et eksempel på misinformation, som det oftest praksiseres i politik og på sociale medier. 🧵 (1/4)dr.dkP1 Orientering | Tirsdag 11. feb. 2025 | DR LYDEr DR-dokumentaren om kryolit i Grønland egentlig retvisende? Er Elon Musks drøm om at købe OpenAI realistisk? Og går EU-regulering af AI for langt? Dagens værter: August Stenbroen og Pernille Rudbæ... 38126
Reposted by Michael WestbergPeter Škrinjar @peterskrinjar.bsky.social · 08/02/2025Excited to share our latest preprint evaluating AlphaFold3, Boltz-1, Chai-1 and Protenix for predicting protein-ligand interactions, featuring our newly introduced benchmark dataset 🌹Runs N’ Poses🌹! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵👇 (1/n)biorxiv.orgHave protein-ligand co-folding methods moved beyond memorisation?Deep learning has driven major breakthroughs in protein structure prediction, however the next critical advance is accurately predicting how proteins interact with other molecules, especially small mo... 412438
Reposted by Michael WestbergJeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 07/02/2025Special Bluetorial: The benefits of different life experiences The scientific community has folks with a very wide range of life experiences. We have a lot to learn from one another.media.tenor.coma cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks onALT: a cartoon says hey everybody an old man 's talking while bart simpson looks on 415853
Reposted by Michael WestbergPossu Huang Lab @possuhuanglab.bsky.social · 15/01/2025New preprint from our group! We propose SHAPES, a set of metrics to quantify the distributional coverage of generative models of protein structures with embeddings at different structural hierarchies and quantify undersampling / extrapolation behaviors. 1277
Reposted by Michael WestbergRichard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 08/01/2025Yes it's important people understand a preprint hasn't been peer-reviewed. BUT it's also important to understand that what "peer-reviewed" means varies considerably, in some cases signifying nothing... www.science.org/content/arti...science.orgPreprints often make news. Many people don’t know what they areThe public needs context about unreviewed manuscripts, survey suggests 914543
Reposted by Michael WestbergJaeseung Hahn @jaeseunghahn.bsky.social · 27/12/2024Aside from the fact that I love Doritos, Cheetos, and all snacks unnaturally orange, I appreciate the physics and potential impact on optical imaging of this paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...science.orgAchieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing moleculesOptical imaging plays a central role in biology and medicine but is hindered by light scattering in live tissue. We report the counterintuitive observation that strongly absorbing molecules can achiev... 172
Reposted by Michael WestbergSaloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 23/12/2024Many people talk about the "Golden Age of Antibiotics", but I hadn't seen it visualized properly. Just how many types of antibiotics were discovered during that time? So, I visualized it myself! 231110382
Reposted by Michael WestbergPossu Huang Lab @possuhuanglab.bsky.social · 17/12/20241/ In two back-to-back papers, we present our de novo TRACeR platform for targeting MHC-I and MHC-II antigens TRACeR for MHC-I: go.nature.com/4gcLzn5 TRACeR for MHC-II: go.nature.com/4gj5OQk 29129
Reposted by Michael WestbergBryan Dickinson @chembiobryan.bsky.social · 10/12/2024Back by popular demand, I present PPI Prediction Challenge #2. My claim: I AM SKEPTICAL COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES CAN PREDICT WHETHER TWO PROTEINS INTERACT. Someone prove me wrong (take two). docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... 1/ndocs.google.comPPI Prediction Challenge #2For this protein-protein interaction prediction challenge, we present three target proteins: KRAS, RAF (the KRAS binding domain), and Mdm2. For each target protein, we are providing you a list of 8 po... 57042
Reposted by Michael WestbergGabriele Corso @gcorso.bsky.social · 08/12/2024You may have seen a recent pre-print [1] from Jain et al. with strongly worded claims against the experimental results in our DiffDock paper [2]. We initially declined to respond as we saw that this preprint contained falsehoods, misleading comparisons, seemingly deliberate omissions, ...1/n 23011
Reposted by Michael WestbergFrank Noe @franknoe.bsky.social · 06/12/2024Super excited to preprint our work on developing a Biomolecular Emulator (BioEmu): Scalable emulation of protein equilibrium ensembles with generative deep learning from @msftresearch.bsky.social ch AI for Science. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 21441147
Reposted by Michael WestbergJonas Wietek @jwietek.bsky.social · 22/11/2024Hey @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social, I think you need to add another icon here 🦋 112721
Reposted by Michael WestbergJeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 22/11/2024PIONEERS When I assumed the position as Director of NIGMS in 2003, Dr. Zerhouni's project for stimulating activities across NIH, The NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, was under active development. The Roadmap included a range of different funding opportunities. 1/n www.science.org/content/arti...science.orgNIH's Roadmap to the Future 111448
Reposted by Michael WestbergIvan Gushchin @ivangushchin.bsky.social · 22/11/2024We engineered bacteriorhodopsin to be soluble. It binds retinal and can photocycle! X-ray structure reveals conserved binding pocket with 0.8 Å all atom RMSD to WT BR. All this became possible due to hard work by Andrey Nikolaev and the team 🙏 #proteindesign biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... 75712
Reposted by Michael WestbergChristopher Frank @chrisfrank662.bsky.social · 22/11/2024Crosspost from X: After showing that AF2 can be used to design very large proteins by performing #RSO, I am happy to share another fun project we did: the #af2cycler @sokrypton.org @hendrikdietz.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...biorxiv.orgAlphafold2 refinement improves designability of large de novo proteinsRecent advances in computational protein design have enabled the creation of novel proteins for a variety of purposes. The capability for producing custom-shape high-quality backbones for very large p... 14115