Benjamin Schuster-Böckler

Daphne Jackson Fellowship opportunity 👩🏻‍🔬👨🏻‍🔬 funded by Orthopaedic Research UK. Are you - or someone you know - looking to return to musculoskeletal research? Check out our part-time and flexible fellowship opportunity daphnejackson.org/fellowship/o... Please share! #ResearchReturners

A cast of the skull of 'Stan', one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered, has been put on display in the dining hall at Reuben College. The skull is on loan from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (who rather conveniently have two in their collection).

1/ Our paper, “Enhancer binding kinetics explain transcription factor hub formation,” is now published! Here we set out to understand why transcription factors form bright clusters or “hubs” in the nucleus, and whether those hubs actually control gene activity. tinyurl.com/38uf8348

I released a new small #rust crate that lets you process items in parallel but get them back in order: github.com/Softleif/ord...

Please help spread the word! We are recruiting multiple Postdoctoral Fellows as part of the recently launched Bakar Computational Biomedicine Initiative (BCBI) at UC Berkeley and UCSF. BCBI website: bcbi.berkeley.edu Apply by Nov 1, 2026: berkeley.infoready4.com#freeformComp... (1/n)

Holy moly, @ensembl.org killed biomart! Hope many R scripts are there out there that depend on biomaRt? How many people have informatics practicals, or undergraduate project instructions that depend on a web interface for bulk selection of data?

Who needs chromatin anyway...? NOT THIS GUY! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/n

More than 50 studies on cell ageing have apparently used the wrong antibody to identify a key protein in experiments, according to a science sleuth. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

For Lia 🪨

'Riffing with Roger', an Oxford Mathematics Unoriginal starring Roger Penrose. And another Roger (sort of).

Hot hooves strikes again!

A brief note for Nadhim Zahawi.

On this day in 1942, a 5 year old Dutch Jewish girl arrived at Auschwitz with her mother and sister (12) where they were murdered in the gas chamber after selection. The father perished on the 30 Sep 1942. Her name was Betty Stodel Please support @auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social

On this day in 1942, a 7 month old Dutch Jewish girl arrived at Auschwitz with her mother where they were murdered in the gas chamber after selection. The father perished on the 30 Sep 1942. Her name was Edith Poppelsdorf Please support @auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social

For thousands of years, a solar eclipse has been a prophetic harbinger of a spectacular, epoch-making event. Just saying. #VoteBinface #Clacton

In Clacton right now. (Real, not AI!) #VoteBinface

This looks pretty cool:

Yes - he CAN! (Sorry, we had to).

On 6 July 2026 Oxfordshire County Council will repair the lower part of the old stone wall in the alleyway alongside the Mason's Arms in Quarry, but the upper part of the stone wall will be replaced with a metal fence. See this Facebook post plus informative comment www.facebook.com/FriendsofQua...

Yesterday we attended the launch of the Women in Research Charter with the Secretary of State for Science, Technology and Innovation, Liz Kendall - along with some of our Fellows. See the Trust being included in the Charter’s “Best Practice pack” - www.gov.uk/government/p...

We are looking for a Junior Group Leader in Early Cancer Detection: an innovative scientist ready to build an independent research group and bring new ideas to one of our key research themes. Apply: www.nki.nl/news-events/... #tenure #vacancy #juniorPI #faculty #NKI

Very excited to share our new Nature study! We discovered that replication stress stabilizes CTCF-dependent chromatin loops enclosing stressed nascent DNA, where G9a-mediated heterochromatin protects it from nucleolytic degradation. rdcu.be/frzLg Huge thanks to all our collaborators and co-authors!

Congratulations to Prof Richard Durbin, winner of the 2026 Genetics Society Medal! His pioneering work in computational genomics has transformed how we analyse and understand genome sequences.

Faster samtools sort, why aren't you using it? github.com/fg-labs/mako

We need to make sure this editorial goes viral Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now! diabetesjournals.org/care/article...

Exciting breakthrough technology from the lab, now live in @cellcellpress.bsky.social ! Instead of cutting the genome where proteins bind (e.g., Cut&Tag), D&D-seq scars the DNA with a deaminase, allowing single cell genome mapping of TFs and chromatin remodellers!

Is it just me, or did @anthropic.com crank up the sycophancy levels again in Opus 4.8? I'm getting a lot of "great idea" and "very good point" comments since moving from 4.7 🤔

This is really exciting - and more evidence for Rust taking over bioinformatics.

Help please! We need to do some large(ish) cell culture inhibiting E-cadherin with a monoclonal antibody. Does anyone have the DECMA-1 hybridoma cell line so we could purify our own antibody? or a similar monoclonal that would do the job. Any help greatly appreciated, just DM me. Please repost!

Congratulations @robklose.bsky.social for being elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society! royalsociety.org/news/2026/05... great news to have two outstanding scientists, Rob and Colin, from @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social joining the Royal society today!

I know Sean from when I worked on PFAM, then met him again many times at HHMI's Janelia Farm campus. Seeing his group being destroyed like this is devastating - he's a titan of bioinformatics, his contributions have been transformational for genomics and proteomics. Utter madness!

Pleased to share results from the CAcTUS Phase II trial of ctDNA-guided therapy in BRAF-mutant advanced melanoma are now published! 🌵🧬 CAcTUS is the first melanoma trial to adapt treatment based on ctDNA testing. Read: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Patrick Vallance has twice written to MPs saying the budget for curiosity-driven research “will grow as the economy grows” But UKRI has flat cash for curiosity-led research through to 2030 When @isaacbarbosa1.bsky.social asked DSIT where the growth would come from, they had no answer A mystery

@sholtodavid.bsky.social Have you seen this WB from ThermoFisher? Still anti-p53 antibody, but another clone (MA-12648 instead MA5-12557). It also looks like that the band in lane 3 was rotated and reused in lane 4. Moreover, it seems that same band was used for the 2 different clones.

Incredible work. Will be going straight in my final year lectures as an example of how to combine genome-wide data with modelling to answer mechanistic hypotheses.

Extremely cool stuff coming from the team here: re-implementing htslib from scratch, with a focus on performance, compile-time checks and easier API #bioinformatics #ngs

For the most read-data heavy path in perbase, seqair is ~1.5x faster, which is awesome! I need to explore with some more datasets, but that's a pretty awesome win right off the bat.

Oxford City Council is to mark Europe Day today, by flying the European flag. Louise Upton, Lord Mayor of Oxford, fresh from her visit to twin town Leiden's Liberation Day celebration, (and re-election on Thursday), is hosting a European Reception in her Parlour at Oxford Town Hall.

Some cool news from the lab: Pascal just built a faster, more memory efficient htslib in pure Rust that passes the same test suite used for htslib itself! Give how fundamental htslib is to NGS applications, this could be hugely impactful. We'd love to get feedback and contributions! #rust #bioinf

I came here in 1975. I'm a Nobel Prize-winning scientist born in Germany during WWII, came here in 1975 thinking there was no way fascism could take hold in this country. I was wrong. I don't not want to be book-ended by two fascist regimes. We will stand up and set things right.

This is a really important issue - pubmed and other websites distort authorship contributions by only using the first/last author instead of honouring the "equal contributions" designation. This has real-life impact and disincentivises team science:

Ludwig @oxfordcancer.bsky.social’s Sabrina James presented her research at #AACR2026 in a poster titled “Unexpected identification of tumor-infiltrating H. pylori or human papillomavirus (HPV) 16 in three exceptional responders in immunochemotherapy-treated esophageal cancer.” #CanSky #OncoSky

Good piece. “If your problem with open access is that commercial publishers are hoovering up all the money, design open access interventions that specifically prevent commercial publishers from receiving your money.”