MK-6240 is a PET imaging agent that can discern subtle early-stage Alzheimer's brain changes. How does it interact with Alzheimer's tau filaments at a high-resolution molecular level? 🔬⚡Read on and check out our bioRxiv article:

Happy to share our new study on mitigating xenogeneic barriers to chimerism through Cas13-induced host attenuation: Developmental Cell cell.com/developmental-cell/… Congratulations to Bingbing, Shjian, Jia and the entire team!

Grateful for the continued support from the Parkinson’s Foundation. We have exciting synuclein data to share—stay tuned :)

The next discovery in treating brain diseases may come from tiny cell structures. David Sanders, Ph.D., studies biomolecular condensates and their role in Alzheimer’s/ALS—work that earned him the @NIH Director’s New Innovator Award. Explore more: bit.ly/4o8rsKe #UTSWMed

@MDiamond_Lab for recruiting me to this wonderful institution; @brangwynnelab for taking a chance on a postdoc with a psychology degree; @ShahmoraLab for co-leading our remarkable group of scientists; and our amazing lab members and @NIH for believing in our high risk research!

Returning to Science Twitter briefly to thank the UTSW newsroom for their kind story on my New Innovator award. Humbling experience. A few thank yous to follow, as most haven't switched to the "other" place. :)

A UT undergrad wrote a very interesting paper that uses neural cellular automata to solve some of the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) AGI benchmark problems. @TexasScience arxiv.org/abs/2506.15746

1/8 Cryogenic electron tomography (cryoET) is a revolution already in motion! @MishaKudryashev argues that in situ structural biology is exploding, forcing us to rethink cells, molecules, and collaborations: tinyurl.com/4x4bf9ze Let’s unpack that 👇 #CryoET #StructuralBiology

We have a preprint for you EHD2 forms rings on caveolae necks, in contrast to most EHDs forming helices. We determined its structure on membranes and show that N-term acts as a spacer By Elena Vazquez-Sarandeses, Vasya @v_mikirtumov Jeff Noel&Oli Daumke biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

Building atomic models to cryo-EM maps of huge molecules is intimidating: crowded, uncertain copy numbers, variable resolution ... @theliulab and team show how cross-linking MS can be used to build novel models of unknown complexes, like a giant virus❄️ ❄️biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/…

Our manuscript for remote focus stabilization for oblique plane microcopy is online: opg.optica.org/boe/fulltext.…

Last night my brilliant friend with 20 years of expertise in Neuroscience including a decade at NIDA was fired because she was recently promoted for her outstanding performance and it triggered the probation period. This is not making NIH more efficient, this is not making us healthier, this is not punishing the people who misled the public, this is destroying America’s talent. Her work is instrumental for testing whether new medications to fight addiction are safe and efficacious before they are tested in humans. now that research is at risk. She was the backbone of the lab the most senior person. So much knowledge, talent, know how, wasted, so much science destroyed for the wrong reason. Sigh…

"Don't be afraid!" Randy Schekman says that the most successful scientists are willing to take risks. He uses 2024 chemistry laureate David Baker as an example of how embracing risk can lead to significant rewards. Before Baker transitioned to researching structural biology he studied systems of protein transport in yeast. Prior to that, he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and social science, demonstrating that no career change is too drastic. Schekman was awarded the 2013 medicine prize jointly with James Rothman and Thomas Südhof for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.

Hi, it’s nice to meet you. I am a #brain scientist. My life's mission is to prevent #Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias...or to contribute enough puzzle pieces so that someone else can unlock the mysteries of disease. I might take a day off, but if I’m being honest, maybe just half a day… because puzzle-making takes time when the goal is to save someone’s dad, grandparent, brother, son, momma, aunt, uncle, or best friend from forgetting who their family is. For scientists to build puzzles, we need a table to lay all the pieces on. The place we work gives us the legs of that table. Then, we dream big—writing grants to fund the puzzle pieces. But we also rely on “indirect costs” to build the top of the table, the foundation that holds everything together. I come from nothing...salt of the earth, they say. I had learning problems, but I clawed my way through to be here, working to save your loved ones, no matter which side of the aisle they sit on. #InThisTogether @nytimes @NIHAging

Interesting in learning to process cryo-ET data in the latest version of Warp? I'll be running a workshop on April 22nd in central London, UK details registration: forms.gle/u4Hk73jhenMvpNBR9 Hope to see you there!

The self driving multi-scale microscope from @Daetwyler_St is out. It can image a whole zebrafish embryo longitudinally and follow a region of interest with high resolution. We use it to study immune-cancer cell interactions. nature.com/articles/s41592-0…

Excited to share our new preprint "Dynamic nanoscale architecture of synaptic vesicle fusion in mouse hippocampal neurons" biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/… We combine optogenetic stimulation of neurons with in situ cryo-ET to characterize membrane dynamics during vesicle fusion ❄️🔬⏱️

We performed subtomogram averaging on complexes from >3 MDa to ~200 kDa, including 80S ribosomes, Rubisco, clathrin, microtubules, ATP synthase photosystem II, and nucleosomes. Most density maps achieved sub-nanometer resolution!🔬✨ #CryoET #StructuralBiology #VisualProteomics

Our experience with #alphafold3 🤖 (code recently released) and some of our most recent #cryoEM 🔬 structures (thread below) nature.com/articles/s41586-0… nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

HHMI Investigator Joshua Mendell (@Mendell_lab) at @UTSWMedCenter helped discover that tRNAs play a role in stabilizing or degrading some mRNAs during translation. Their findings could one day help tailor vaccines and disease therapies. Learn more: hhmi.news/4hZMqJa 👈