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Xiaohan Li

@xlichem.bsky.social
589 followers 826 following 26 posts

Postdoc in Miller lab @UoDundeeLifeSciences. Previous: #MSCAFellow @MRC_LMB; PhD @YaleChem; CCME @PKU1898 IDP/IDRs, membrane traffic, protein dynamics, evolution. scholar.google.com/citations?user=-…

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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
This is really fun! I never realised how much English I learned in New England lol.
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WALIIAnhydro @waliianhydro.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Save the Date! The 2nd Annual WALII Symposium is happening on November 12, 2026! Join us to hear from these four outstanding invited speakers! More details coming soon! #WALIISymposium #Science #LifeWithoutWater #DesiccationTolerance
Four symposium speakers’ portraits with names, affiliations, event date (Nov 12, 2026), and times for the 2nd WALII Symposium are shown against a desert background.
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Liz Miller @lizmillercu.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
*JobAlert* One more week to apply for a post-doc position in my lab at Dundee to study co-translational protein quality control of secretory and membrane proteins. This is a collaborative project with @kulathu.bsky.social and @zeqiraj.bsky.social www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSM201/p...
jobs.ac.uk
Postdoctoral Research Assistant - UOD2336 at University of Dundee
Discover an exciting academic career path as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant - UOD2336 at jobs.ac.uk. Don't miss out on this job opportunity - apply today!
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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
#AI #LLM Something I've not seen commented on is the explosion of bot-impeding pages (e.g., via Cloudflare) that now appear before web pages load. The cumulative time waste for human users has got to be in the billions of person-hours. An immense burden imposed on everyone by the AI-bro assholes.
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Liz Miller @lizmillercu.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Job alert! I'm recruiting a new post-doc to work on mechanisms of co-translational quality control in the ER. Looking for expertise in ribosome biology and yeast genetics/cell biology. Please reach out to me with any questions. www.dundee.ac.uk/work-for-us/...
dundee.ac.uk
Postdoctoral Research Assistant - UOD2336
Closing date: Thursday 27 August 2026, 23:59
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Shahar Sukenik @shaharsu.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Finally out - our work on high throughput design and characterization of disordered protein sequences 🪱🪱🪱. A long time collaboration with BFFs @alexholehouse.bsky.social and @remenecker.bsky.social, with experimental work led by @trevorbrandt.bsky.social and @karaehunt.bsky.social.
nature.com
Rational design of disordered proteins for sequence–function investigation - Nature
GOOSE enables the design and testing of thousands of disordered protein region sequences to reveal distinct sequence-to-function relationships.
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Congratulations Shahar! Wonderful tool.
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Congratulations! This is really exciting work -- cannot wait to try the pipeline!
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Kresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
Everything you wanted to know about the protein chemistry behind how amino-acid changes affect the cellular abundance of proteins from @tkschulze.bsky.social Effects of residue substitutions on the cellular abundance of proteins doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
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Kresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
Are you analysing hydrophobicity in disordered proteins and still using the Kyte & Doolittle scale? Maybe instead consider the "stickiness-scale" that Fan & Giulio derived using SAXS data for >100 IDPs doi.org/10.1021/acs....
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Ben Long @botbml.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
Partitioning of Rubisco activase into the pyrenoidal Rubisco condensate is mediated by a functional protein-protein interaction "doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70724-5" www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Partitioning of Rubisco activase into the pyrenoidal Rubisco condensate is mediated by a functional protein-protein interaction - Nature Communications
Algal photosynthesis relies on a biomolecular condensate known as the pyrenoid, which sequesters the cell’s Rubisco. The pyrenoid constituent Rubisco activase partitions to the condensate via an eleme...
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Alexis Verger 🧬🧫🧪 @alexis-verger.cpesr.fr · 17/04/2026
😭 openai.com/index/introd...
openai.com
Introducing GPT-Rosalind for life sciences research
OpenAI introduces GPT-Rosalind, a frontier reasoning model built to accelerate drug discovery, genomics analysis, protein reasoning, and scientific research workflows.
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
This is (I think) a Greater Blue-Eared Starling (Lamprotornis chalybaeus) & the amazing chrome job is their super-power. They've evolved to manipulate light in VERY specific ways, attracting mates, intimidating rivals. Let's look at the nanostructures that bring this bling into being.
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Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
If you consider 'hiring’ AI instead of a graduate student, you're saying the quiet part out loud: PhDs are viewed as a PI's labor force not academics studying for an advanced degree... www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student
“It can competently perform a lot of the work I need immediately,” this professor writes
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Kresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
We are hiring a postdoc in computational biophysics and machine learning studies of intrinsically disordered proteins We aim to study the function of IDPs by combining CG MD, ML and bioinformatics in collaboration with @tanjamittag.bsky.social & @rhp-lab.bsky.social tinyurl.com/REWIRE-PD
Postdoc position:Computational Biophysics of Disordered Proteins, Lindorff-Larsen group, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

https://tinyurl.com/REWIRE-PD
Deadline May 3rd, 2026
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BWJones @bwjones.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
This is kinda bonkers. In addition, 20 amino acids were found on Ryugu, along with uracil and vitamin B3. These have been found in other instances, but since the samples from Ryugu were collected directly from the asteroid and delivered in sealed capsules, contamination on Earth could be ruled out.
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TJ McCorvie @allostericstate.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
When you still haven't solved the orientation bias of your protein sample #CryoEM
Low resolution cryo-EM map that looks like Cuban's skull
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Mart Krupovic @mkrupovic.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
With Eugene Koonin, we propose a concept of “the selfish ribosome”, under which evolution of life is viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensures the propagation of the ribosome. arxiv.org/abs/2602.23268
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MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology @mrclmb.ac.uk · 24/02/2026
Are you a structural biologist pushing the boundaries of molecular science with an ambitious research programme? Join our Structural Studies Division as a tenure-track Group Leader, with core funding, world-leading facilities & enthusiastic colleagues. Apply by 16 MAR www.nature.com/naturecareer...
Job opening for Research Group Leader in Structural Studies at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, focusing on macromolecular structures.
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Congratulations Alex! Been waiting for the in press version since the preprint — really exciting work!
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Alex Holehouse @alexholehouse.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Papers are like buses... You wait for ages, then two come along at once. Huge congrats to @bornanovak.bsky.social and @jefflotthammer.bsky.social for pushing and driving every aspect of this work, preprinted ~1 year ago to the day (Friday before BPS), now published! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Accurate predictions of disordered protein ensembles with STARLING - Nature
The deep learning model STARLING can generate accurate ensembles of intrinsically disordered regions of proteins using only protein sequence as input.
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bioRxiv Cell Biology @biorxiv-cellbio.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
Structural basis of caveolin-driven membrane bending www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Alex Merz 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇺🇦 @merz.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
As Fran was nice enough to highlight this, I thought I'd put up a brief thread. 3 in 10 proteins that our cells make are either embedded in membranes (ion channels, adhesion molecules, etc.) or secreted (insulin, antibodies). They move through the secretory pathway. 1/
simple diagram of the secretory pathway.
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MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology @mrclmb.ac.uk · 27/01/2026
Exciting opportunity for a #postdoc to join @suyangzhang.bsky.social’s group in the LMB Structural Studies Division to investigate co-transcriptional splicing using cryo-EM and biochemistry. Read more: www.nature.com/naturecareer... Apply by 11 FEB #PostdocJobs #ScienceJobs
Suyang Zhang smiles in front of a blurred laboratory background
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birdsonglab.bsky.social @birdsonglab.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Why do mated songbirds sing beautifully coordinated duets? My Ph.D. work showed that duets are cooperative signals that pairs use to defend their shared territory. This visual summary is based on Logue & Gammon 2004 Animal Behaviour 68: 521-531 and Logue 2005 Cognition, Brain, Behavior 9:497-510.
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Stephen Royle @steveroyle.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Physicists' perspective on the future direction of condensates in Cell Biology. arxiv.org/abs/2601.03677
arxiv.org
Roadmap for Condensates in Cell Biology
Biomolecular condensates govern essential cellular processes yet elude description by traditional equilibrium models. This roadmap, distilled from structured discussions at a workshop and reflecting t...
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
Knowledge is about interacting with nature, making reasoning, then communicating the excitements and discovery to the community; not by chewing “decoders” output and then throw random things to “encoders” and sell the outputs again.
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
Really don’t understand why loads of people are advocating delegation of paper reading and reference searching to AI, and even paper-writing using AI. It’s like volunteering to be left out of the discovery process and intellectual works, happily living as a slave to the “transformers”.
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Kresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
Experimental structures provide valuable hypotheses and accelerate but do not replace evolutionary and statistical analyses of protein sequences
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
Very exciting project! Trafficking, IDRs, and structural biology!
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
Apologies I was a bit unclear with "unstructured in functional complex"; I was suggesting the possibility of structured regions interact to provide specificity (frequently enthalpy contributions), IDRs remain unstructured to tune entropic effects of the system, keeping them dynamic.
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
For the "remain disordered in functional state", I tend to think most AF2 predicted low pLDDT regions belongs to this class, frequently doesn't involve in a binding event. One quick example in my head is the epsin/AP180 example www.nature.com/articles/nco...
nature.com
Intrinsically disordered proteins drive membrane curvature - Nature Communications
Proteins that bend membranes often contain curvature-promoting structural motifs such as wedges or crescent-shaped domains. Busch et al.report that intrinsically disordered domains can also drive memb...
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
I think one classic example of both disordered then to stable helical transition, might be the ACTR-CBP system. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11823864/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24449148/
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
In this case we may also want to revisit the definition of IDRs and reclassify…we used to define them as no stable secondary/tertiary structures in solution, but this may simply be a reflection of good solvation. We may redefine “canonical IDRs” as being unstructured even in functional complexes
solvation.it
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
I guess in this case the only case of exception might be when two IDRs interact with each other they co-fold with each other which gives a specific new interface… but considering the amount of entropic penalty from IDR-IDR to complete structure, this might be rare…
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
This is a great point! In this case, would you think it might also be a good idea to treat IDR-IDR interaction differently than IDR-folded domain interaction, independent of the affinity? Maybe as long as one of the partner is folded, the interface would already be specified…
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Sjors Scheres @sjorsscheres.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Postdoc opportunity with Michel Goedert and myself to work on #cryoEM/#cryoET structures of #amyloids. Feel free to email me with any questions you might have. mrc.tal.net/vx/mobile-0/...
mrc.tal.net
Postdoctoral Scientist - Neurobiology - Dr Michel Goedert - LMB 2752 - Medical Research Council
Location: Cambridge. Vacancy: Postdoctoral Scientist - Neurobiology - Dr Michel Goedert - LMB 2752. Closing Date: 04/01/2026, 23:55
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Hi Andrea, I really like your paper cited here. The figure highlights the importance of cellular context not just for phase separation studies, but for interpretation of most in vitro data involving interactions between macromolecules in general as well, especially for low affinity ones...
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Kresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
Our review on Integrative modelling of biomolecular dynamics 💃 is now live at COSB We discuss approaches to integrate computational methods with time-dependent & time-resolved experiments to study protein dynamics With @dariagusew.bsky.social & Carl G. Henning Hansen doi.org/10.1016/j.sb...
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でんか @k-hermit.com · 08/12/2025
I found a tiny octopus on the tide pool🐙✨️ Small as it is, it’s every bit an octopus ... and absolutely adorable!! It even shoots ink🫧 ͛.*
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Kresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
I agree. I think protein folding is evidence that one can form specific structures that are thermodynamically driven by non-specific, dynamic interactions, with additional contributions to specificity from h-bonds etc (that probably contribute less to the "driving" force).
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Kresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
The structure of most folded proteins are stabilised by the hydrophobic effect which in some sense is quite fuzzy. And the hydrophobic cores of proteins can be quite dynamic.
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
Many congrats Shahar! Really beautiful work and great datasets to look at!
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Shahar Sukenik @shaharsu.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
Now published in @cp-cellsystems.bsky.social - we look at the chemical features that make proteins tolerant to dehydration, and the functions these proteins fill. 🏜️🚱 tinyurl.com/bsfy56yt
tinyurl.com
Protein surface chemistry encodes an adaptive tolerance to desiccation
Desiccated cells lose over 85% of their water content and experience widespread biomolecular dysfunction. Romero-Pérez et al. show that the yeast proteome contains a subset of proteins that are desicc...
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Alexis Verger 🧬🧫🧪 @alexis-verger.cpesr.fr · 21/11/2025
yep, this is very concerning. Some have already tried to raise the alarm in 2022, and since then, the “quality” of AI-generated images has only improved... www.cell.com/patterns/ful...
cell.com
Deepfakes: A new threat to image fabrication in scientific publications?
There is an increasing risk of people using advanced artificial intelligence, particularly the generative adversarial network (GAN), for scientific image manipulation for the purpose of publications. ...
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Alexis Verger 🧬🧫🧪 @alexis-verger.cpesr.fr · 04/11/2025
Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact #AI Failure to make such distinctions can mislead diagnoses, distort judicial judgments and amplify misinformation. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
nature.com
Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact - Nature Machine Intelligence
Suzgun et al. find that current large language models cannot reliably distinguish between belief, knowledge and fact, raising concerns for their use in healthcare, law and journalism, where such disti...
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Yasin Dagdas @plantophagy.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
If you’re into protein evolution, molecular innovation, or just good scientific detective work — we hope you enjoy reading this story as much as we loved uncovering it. Link: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Happy Halloween 👻🌿
nature.com
Electrostatic changes enabled the diversification of an exocyst subunit via protein complex escape - Nature Plants
The evolutionary diversification of an exocyst subunit was enabled by electrostatic shifts leading to its dissociation from the ancestral complex.
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Kresten Lindorff-Larsen @lindorfflarsen.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
We (@sobuelow.bsky.social) developed AF-CALVADOS to integrate AlphaFold and CALVADOS to simulate flexible multidomain proteins at scale See preprint for: — Ensembles of >12000 full-length human proteins — Analysis of IDRs in >1500 TFs 📜 doi.org/10.1101/2025... 💾 github.com/KULL-Centre/...
Figure showing the AF-CALVADOS restraining and simulation protocol based on AF2 structure, PAE and pLDDT
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Xiaohan Li @xlichem.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
If you are interested in membrane trafficking and IDPRs, please join us!
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Hao Yin @haoyin.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
Best practices & tools in R & Python for statistical processing and visualization of #Lipidomics & #Metabolomics data Data imputation/normalization Batch correction Data visualization Statistical models Instrumental handbook, adoptable for other omics #NatComms 2025 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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