Arjun Bhatta

Our story on the mechanism of mitochondrial and nuclear tRNA 3' processing is finally out in NSMB. 😇 We discover how a unique problem caused by high mutation rates in mitochondria of bilaterian animals is solved by a compensatory evolutionary innovation. doi.org/10.1038/s41594-024-01445-w

What can cyanide tell us about the origins of life? Jianfeng Xu and John Sutherland (LMB PNAC Division) recreate the conditions of early Earth in the laboratory to study how the building blocks of life first formed – and sodium cyanide is crucial to this. youtu.be/8qG7ETIhfkQ?... #LMBintheNews

This week, I had the incredible opportunity to present our work on tRNA processing systems at #ESSRNA. Thank you to the organisers for this privilege, my mentors @haukehillen.bsky.social and @kellythd-nguyen.bsky.social for the support, and the fellow participants for the great discussions!

A technology feature in Nature describes how scientists are using cell-free transcription and translation systems to synthesize proteins, design biology-based sensors and develop synthetic cells. 🧪

The archaeon Sukunaarchaeum mirabile, associated with dinoflagellates, has a genome of only 238 kbp🧬🤯 #archaea #symbiosis #eukaryotes #protists #MicroSky @currentbiology.bsky.social www.cell.com/current-biol...

We are looking for a new team member! Interested in structural biology, gene expression and organelles? Then apply now to our open PhD position: umg.recruiting-portal.com/r/z11okjqp6v...

Cryo-EM peeps are living the dream www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🚨 After 40 years of research, Brazilian scientist Dr. Mariangela Hungria wins the World Food Prize for pioneering a $2 nitrogen-fixing bacteria treatment that replaces costly fertilizers, saves farmers $25 billion annually, and cuts 230 million tons of CO₂ emissions.

How do 2 meters of DNA fit inside a nucleus you can barely see? 🧬 Our new study mapped individual nucleosomes inside human cells.

📢 We are now recruiting a PhD student in Structural and Molecular Virology in Sweden 🇸🇪 Work on RNA viruses using cryo-EM and in situ cryo-ET, with access to world-class microscopy infrastructure Perfect for candidates with backgrounds in biochem, structural bio, and virology More info ⬇️

We're super excited to share MissAlignment: a new ML-based approach to reference-free tilt series alignment, spearheaded by @martenchaillet.bsky.social. We think it's going to make your cryo-ET life a lot better. Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Code: github.com/warpem/miss-... 🧶 Thread:

If you use GitHub (especially if you pay for it!!) consider doing this *immediately* Settings -> Privacy -> Disallow GitHub to train their models on your code. GitHub opted *everyone* into training. No matter if you pay for the service (like I do). WTH github.com/settings/cop...

Vinith Kishore et al.: ICECREAM: high-fidelity equivariant cryo-electron tomography #CryogenicElectronTomography #SelfSupervisedLearning #MachineLearning @insadelyon...#IUCr https://journals.iucr.org/paper?S2059798326001622

Finally, we used a mild photocrosslinking strategy (pXL-EM) to improve reconstruction quality, inspired by its successful use in recent work from @alessandrovannini.bsky.social at Human Technopole, led by @aleborsellini.bsky.social. Have a look at his preprint doi.org/10.64898/202... (6/7🧵)

📢 First preprint from the Casañal Lab! Excited to share our work on human NSUN2, done together with the brilliant @ecleroy.bsky.social. Using #CryoEM, we capture the dramatic structural rearrangement of tRNA as it flips a cytidine into the NSUN2 catalytic pocket for m⁵C modification. Take a look👇

⚡️We are excited to share a new paper from the lab by @drkhole.bsky.social in @cp-cellrepmethods.bsky.social - suggesting MitoTracker dyes are not a reliable tool for detecting intercellular mitochondrial transfer❗️ www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Happy to share our new preprint on the mechanism of human tRNA 3' CCA maturation! This project was spearheaded by Bernhard Kuhle in my group, with contributions from many others and a great collaboration with the group of Peter Rehling (UMG). See highlights below! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Congratulations to @kellythd-nguyen.bsky.social, Group Leader in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, who has been named the Life Sciences Laureate at the 2026 Blavatnik Awards in the UK 🎉 Read the full news story here: mrclmb.ac.uk/news-events/... #LMBNews #Blavatnik2026

Scientists have seen Asgard archaea crawling for the first time. When it comes to the origin of eukaryotes, this is like seeing a feathered dinosaur in the wild. (Video courtesy of Philipp Ralder)

Pleased to share the final version of this behemoth of a paper, now finally published. I guess I can retire now? www.nature.com/articles/s41... More functional data, many thousands of words removed, and a few other updates from last year's preprint.

Are you a bachelor or master student anywhere in the world, and would like to come to us to work full-time on a supervised research project? Applications for the 2026 MPIA Summer Internship are open now!

IsoNet2 determines cellular structures at submolecular resolution without averaging pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41415472/ #cryoEM

Rewiring protein sequence and structure generative models to enhance protein stability prediction [new] Boost protein stability prediction via language & inverse folding models. Structure informs sequence.

Organelles do NOT have a single uniform pH. And if you think they must, because “protons diffuse fast,” this paper is for you. A thread on why that assumption is wrong; and what we found instead. 🧵 1/n

Holy cow the Zhou lab at UCLA is cooking with Isonet 2 - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Averaging-free direct visualization of ribosome translational state! #teamtomo #cryoet

Despair seems like a reasonable course of action 'Some estimates are that up to 20% of the entire proteome can bind RNA and moreover that about 20% of all known protein complexes have an RNA component in them and you really have to think about how to deal with such large figures.'

How's your juggling act? Mitochondria also have one, and the MITOtalk this week will be all about it. See you there?

We are looking for a computational postdoc to work with us on new optimisation algorithms to make #RELION even better. Join our bubbly team at the @mrclmb.bsky.social in Cambridge, UK. 🤗 RTs appreciated. mrc.tal.net/vx/appcentre...

don’t have an answer for you but if you’re looking at cell tomograms often I can’t recommend Don Fawcett’s big red book The Cell highly enough - it’s a *beautiful* atlas of classic EM images

Initial attempt at replicating in relion (parameters in next post). This is for Aca2-RNA, using a 100k subset of the 2D-classified particles (no prior 3D cleanup). A 1-class ab initio in relion, then local refinement in relion (1.8deg searches+blush) gives a nominally 3.3Å map; 3.5 Å w/out blush.

This one is a bit of a departure from the usual and definitely a work in progress! We found that by using ab initio reconstruction at very high res, in very small steps, we could crack some small structures that had eluded us - e.g. 39kDa iPKAc (EMPIAR-10252), below. Read on for details... 1/x

Congratulations to Dirk Görlich and Steven L. McKnight, 2025 #LaskerAward winners! - “for discoveries that exposed the structures and functions of low-complexity domains within protein sequences” 🧪 @mpi-nat.bsky.social #Lasker2025 #LaskerLaureate #structuralbiology #phaseseparation

bioRxiv bat signal. We had a huge influx of submissions around Labor Day and now have a backlog. If any affiliates are available to screen, we'd be eternally grateful!

"...if few within science are trained to communicate about their work and those who do are not only not rewarded but disparaged, then it is not as hard to see why the war on science has been prosecuted with little resistance." www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

We're hiring a postdoc! Join our ActinID project to explore an uncharacterized actin-binding protein. - Background in cell and/or structural biology? - Eager to bridge both fields? Get in touch if you're curious or have questions! #cellbiology #cryoEM #cryoET #actin ista.ac.at/en/job/postd...

So cool, a novel archaeon with a super small genome and no metabolic genes! "An unprecedented level of metabolic dependence on a host, a condition that challenges the functional distinctions between minimal cellular life and viruses." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

ICYMI: New online: Structure of fungal tRNA ligase Trl1 with RNA reveals conserved substrate-binding principles

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬 Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

Cryogenic electron microscopy showed for the first time that large RNA complexes can assemble without the help of proteins, expanding our understanding of RNA folding and function. www6.slac.stanford.e...

spent some time this evening updating the teamtomo.org site - if you're interested in cryo-EM + Python you might want to take a look around!

A really comprehensive video about PFAS: history, chemistry, planetary contamination, effects. Worth watching. By @veritasium.bsky.social

A colder frontier in cryo-EM 🧪🔬 Chris Russo’s group, inc. Joshua Dickerson, adapted #cryoEM to work at liquid helium temperatures (13 kelvins), where every frame captured contains more information than the equivalent using liquid nitrogen (81 kelvins). Read more: tinyurl.com/mwwcunkc #LMBResearch

A colleague at Stanford’s business school used The Stanford Daily to argue—poorly—against DEI. The piece was riddled with historical errors and left one searching for fact, so I broke my public writing hiatus to respond. I hope you’ll read and share the piece. stanforddaily.com/2025/04/22/w...

If your perception is that all interactions are transactional and that there is no such thing as sincerity of curiosity, or a desire to discover, then you will never value science. No matter how many economic arguments there are for funding it. Because you don’t understand the fundamental premise.

This is exciting! A platform to share small and unpublishable results will be immensely helpful to the scientific community to minimize research waste and address the reproducability crisis. #ResearchAgora #OpenScience

The peer-revied version of our paper on the structure of the Nipah virus RNA polymerase in complex with RNA is out in @naturecomms.bsky.social. Congratulations to first-author @salafernanda.bsky.social and many thanks to the reviewers for their constructive comments! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

youtu.be/M4WU8gqrgsQ?... This is how I heard about it!

Structural basis of Nipah virus RNA synthesis pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40050611/ #cryoEM

🇩🇪🇺🇸 The interference in the German elections by Elon Musk and Washington was "no less radical and outrageous than that of Moscow," — Merz.