Professor@Fudan: Applying laws of Physics & Chemistry to design tools for Biology; Visualizing dynamic cell signaling in vivo, and expecting unexpected fun🤪.

Joined December 2014
48 Photos and videos
Xiaokun Shu retweeted
If you don’t exercise, just do 3x1 minute bursts of intense movement daily (rush up the stairs, walk briskly, bike hard, etc) In a UK Biobank study, this was associated with a 40% reduction in mortality
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
Exercise Delays Brain Ageing Through Muscle-Brain Crosstalk onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
29 Sep 2025
Scientists boosted a single protein in aging mice and the results were wild. Stronger muscles. Denser bones. Sharper cognition. All linked to Klotho, often called the ā€œlongevity protein.ā€ It is only mice, and humans are more complex. But if Klotho proves out in people, we may not just add years to life. We may add youth to age. The frontier of longevity is shifting from vitamins to gene therapy.
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
For those attending the #AACR25 Cancer Evolution Working Group Town Hall, don't miss the review in this month's issue: The Hallmarks of Cancer as Eco-Evolutionary Processes brnw.ch/21wShlV By @RanjiniBhattac2 and colleagues
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AACR, Chicago. New Physical Biology of Oncoprotein Condensates: Differential regulation of the transcriptome by phase separation.
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
Beautiful paper. Scientists solved the structure of myosin—the protein that forms contractile filaments in muscle cells—in multiple configurations using Cryo-EM. They captured the entire power stroke action (where myosin pulls on actin to shorten the muscle) at4.4 Å resolution.
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
AI can't "solve" all diseases for the simple reason that all diseases were solved by computational chemistry in 1985, by high throughput screening in 1995, by genomics in 2000, by RNAi in 2004, by stem cells and nanotechnology in 2005, before being solved by CRISPR in 2015. @DShaywitz
No shortage of money at AI trailblazer Isomorphic. $600M raised with an eye to "solving" all diseases. @ky_lahucik has the story for @endpts. endpts.com/isomorphic-labs-g…
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
Here’s a list of all major sources of DNA damage in our daily lives & how to avoid them.. 🧵
Replying to @davidasinclair
But what is causing this damage?
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
Extremely clever new NGS tech from Roche 🧬 If it's hard to discriminate between nucleic acids accurately with a nanopore, why not synthesize a new polymer off a DNA template that is easier to sequence? It's an intuitively simple idea, but took *a ton* of creative nucleic acid chemistry enzyme engineering to design modified NTPs and create polymers of them. It's been very interesting to see Roche move into the NGS market, and time will tell how this stacks up with the growing set of totally orthogonal approaches people are cooking up for sequencing tech. It feels like we are entering another renaissance for biological measurement infrastructure—which is super important. ā€œProgress depends on the interplay of techniques, discoveries, and ideas, probably in that order." - Sydney Brenner (These animations of sequencing tech will never get old to me. What a time to be a biologist!)
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted

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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
Crystal structures are *not* God-given truth. They approximate, w/ flaws & errors, X-ray diffraction data. AlphaFold etc. have been trained on structures, not data. SFCalculator now differentiably connects structures to diffraction data. What does this enable? 🧵 1/4
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
27 Jan 2025
1. Before DeepSeek, Liang was the genius behind Huanfang Quantitative, an AI-powered hedge fund that crushed Wall Street. His algorithms predicted market trends with scary accuracy. But Liang wasn’t satisfied. He saw a bigger problem to solve: AI for everyone, not just the elite.
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
27 Jan 2025
He is Liang Wenfeng, CEO of DeepSeek AI. šŸš€ 5 years ago, he walked away from Wall Street to chase a dream. His insane journey will blow your mind. (Read below) šŸ‘‡
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
These two photographs are separated by only 66 years.
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
Beyond troubling racial implications @MIT @NeurIPSConf, the quote do NOT represent Chinese education or culture, which emphasize morality, virtue and doing the right thing. rely on hearsay and broadly paint Chinese or Chinese students in a negative category is simply unacceptable
1/3 Today, an anecdote shared by an invited speaker at #NeurIPS2024 left many Chinese scholars, myself included, feeling uncomfortable. As a community, I believe we should take a moment to reflect on why such remarks in public discourse can be offensive and harmful.
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
14 Dec 2024
Most MIT profs who I know are extremely honest and morally upright. I hope this is an exception.
Mitigating racial bias from LLMs is a lot easier than removing it from humans! Can’t believe this happened at the best AI conference @NeurIPSConf We have ethical reviews for authors, but missed it for invited speakers? 😔
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
It's like when a journalist asks Ted Bundy why he's a serial killer, and he says it's because American society didn't teach him morals and values, so the journalist concludes that American society won't teach morals and values.
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Xiaokun Shu retweeted
Mitigating racial bias from LLMs is a lot easier than removing it from humans! Can’t believe this happened at the best AI conference @NeurIPSConf We have ethical reviews for authors, but missed it for invited speakers? 😔
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Looking for long-term collaborators to demo & apply new ultrasensitive protease, kinase, PPI reporters/tools (unpublished) in model organisms e.g. worm, fly, zebrafish, mice, plants, who are open to share the resources to the community. It will be fun! Email: xiaokun.shu@ucsf.edu
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