Randy Read 🇨🇦🇬🇧

The model building was very challenging with all these co-factors, I would not have managed without ISOLDE so thanks a lot @crolltristan.bsky.social !!

Scotty can also be used to perform a PDB-wide analysis of lattice coincidences. The results demonstrate that lattice-level analysis provides a valuable perspective on macromolecular self-association. #Nonisomorphism #PDBAnnotation #Oligomerization doi.org/10.1107/S205...

Scotty can rapidly scan a metric-space index of the PDB archive for closely and distantly related crystal forms and will serve to rapidly phase these structures by difference FFT #Nonisomorphism #NiggliCell #CrystallographicContaminants doi.org/10.1107/S205...

The PhD and Postdoc application links are now live! Come join me at UNIL to work on deep learning for protein structure, interactions & design. pickybinders.org#open-positions

I’m looking forward to seeing what your new group gets up to!

This is really highly deserved for all of her seminal contributions!

Thrilled to share that our paper describing protein-dependent frameshifting is now out in Molecular Cell @cellpress.bsky.social. Huge congratulations to @jemmabetts.bsky.social for publishing the first research paper from her PhD 🧬🧪🥳 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/8

Delighted to be hosting the MRC Centre of Research Excellence in Mitochondrial Genome Therapeutics from Apr '27; bringing together global experts in mitochondrial disease & clinical translation to improve patient outcomes for devastating mitochondrial DNA diseases. www.cimr.cam.ac.uk/news/mrc-cen...

Fantastic, congratulations!

I’ve interacted with Karissa (@sanbonmatsu.bsky.social) at Phenix workshops, and it’s great to see this recognition!

If you're a UK scientist depending on national facilities like Diamond Light Source, please consider signing this letter! openletter.earth/open-letter-...

Microscopy Nodes 3.1 is out for Blender 5.2! 🎉 This has cool new features for conditional masking, working with even larger data (regional upscaling), and data manipulation! Watch the new youtube tutorials that explain the features: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... Get back in your sandbox, HAL.

Atomic models powered bioAI's first era. Experiments measure more. @rs-station.bsky.social is joining omsf.io to unlock interpretation of raw exp observables at scale (blog👇); we'll partner with @openfold.io, @openbind.bsky.social , and cryo-EM+X-ray facilities to make this routine. Join us!

Editor in Chief of Science: AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive.

My favourite announcement was: “This train has been cancelled due to a late change in the schedule”.

July issue now available: journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... The cover highlights Scotty, a tool within the Phasertng codebase that leverages Niggli-cell matches to identify similar crystallographic lattices and perform phasing with difference Fourier methods. Read more at doi.org/10.1107/S205...

Congratulations!

Both the Hoodoos in the local landscape of Drumheller and the Tyrrell Museum are amazing!

Our June issue is now available! journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... The cover highlights a new fusion tool that has been developed to enable the structure determination of G protein-coupled receptors in inactive conformations by cryo-EM. Find out more at doi.org/10.1107/S205...

The architecture of carriers formed by AP3:ARF1 for lysosomal membrane protein transport: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/.... Work from @jggkaufman.bsky.social, in collaboration with @dgershlick.bsky.social and David Owen. @mpibiochem.bsky.social @thecimr.bsky.social

Yes, there are several related contaminant lists that are mostly aimed at crystallography. The original is ContaMiner (strube.cbrc.kaust.edu.sa/contaminer/c...) and there are lists underlying SIMBAD in CCP4 and, recently, phasertng.changeling (Phenix, soon CCP4). A list for cryoEM would be great!

We are excited to be at our annual Bijvoet Symposium today, for a day filled with exciting structural biology presented by our PhD students and postdocs!

Take a look at the May issue: journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... On the cover: radiation damage to bound ligands in the active site of urate oxidase at 100 K and room temperature - find out more at journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202...

Great places to visit, and Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is as memorable as its name!

Please repost! This comes from the good people at ChimeraX, who produce powerful up-to-date software to study protein (etc) structures, which are FREE to the community. 🙏 To stay viable and serve us, they need an experienced structural biologist to assume the leadership role on a funded project.

An international team of researchers, including scientists from the University of Cambridge, has identified a new way coronaviruses can enter human cells. 🦠 Prof Stephen Graham explains why this breakthrough matters for future health risks. Read more 👉 www.cam.ac.uk/research/new...

Access alternate functional conformations encoded in AlphaFold’s latent space in a few GPU minutes 👇 We also introduce a novel supervised transfer task: train once on a source (GPCR/kinase/transporter) and apply across the family. Work led by Minji!

The more challenging targets CASP gets, the more the structural biology community will learn!

So, OpenAI, whose entire business model relies on some overhyped dudebros using vast amounts of stolen data and stolen labour, is releasing a specialised GPT for the life sciences. And naming it, apparently without any sense of irony or self-awareness. Rosalind.

Sad news on the passing of Prof. Andreas Engel, a pioneer in the field of cryo-EM (shared with the 3DEM community by Henning Stahlberg). Andreas' kindness, warmth, and enthusiasm for science and his colleagues will be missed.

We're a big step closer to automated determination of protein structures. The key? Having AlphaFold listen to experimental data. Great work, led by @alisiafadini.bsky.social and @minhuanli.bsky.social in an inspiring collaboration with @moalquraishi.bsky.social and @randyjread.bsky.social.

ROCKET came out on Nature Methods today. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to translate a research concept into a practical tool—one that researchers can seamlessly drop into their existing pipelines. We learned a lot along the path and will carry that spirit forward.

Exciting to see the final form of this great work out in print!

Our heavily updated final version of ROCKET for experiment-guided structure modeling is out in @naturemethods! New frontiers like high-throughput fragment screening and mid-res tomography are forcing a rethink of how experiments are modeled. ROCKET+OpenFold proposes a solution👇

Very happy to have had a chance to attack an initially very low-resolution #cryo-EM map with #ROCKET! Thank you again @alisiafadini.bsky.social and all other co-authors of this important work, which truly shows the power of combining experimental structural biology and #AI inference. rdcu.be/fa9YH

Starting from an #AlphaFold-Multimer prediction, we used #ROCKET to build a model of ZPD, a homopolymeric zona pellucida (#ZP) protein, into an initial #cryo-EM map at only ~9 Å resolution. A subsequently obtained 4.6 Å map highlighted how superior the ROCKET model was over the initial prediction:

It was a fantastic trip and a pleasure talking with the Pfizer team 😄 One highlight was discovering they’ve built a web GUI for ROCKET to make it more accessible—I’m thrilled (and even a bit surprised) to see how our tool helping people solve real-world problems.

New OpenFold3 preview out! (OF3p2) It closes the gap to AlphaFold3 for most modalities. Most critically, we're releasing everything, including training sets & configs, making OF3p2 the only current AF3-based model that is functionally trainable & reproducible from scratch🧵1/9

After an Amtrak coding session with @minhuanli.bsky.social, ROCKET team is back at @rs-station.bsky.social HQ! Thank you to Pfizer for welcoming us in Groton and to everyone who attended our seminar online. Exciting work ahead to continue exploring frontiers in structure determination. Back to it 🚀

Take a look at our March issue: journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202... On the cover: the response of two paradigmatic metalloproteins of different types, one iron-containing and one copper-containing, to X-ray-induced metal reduction at cryo- and room temperature journals.iucr.org/d/issues/202...

The @thecimr.bsky.social and MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit are celebrating "Rare Research Day" TODAY! By creating factsheets on how their work contributes to greater understanding and potential treatments. #RareDiseaseDay #ShareYourColours #RareDiseaseDay2026 #UniversityofCambridge

I find Airlie’s composite self rotation representation much easier to interpret. Check it out!

At a time when the UK should be capitalising on its global reputation as a great place to do science, this is an enormous own goal. I am so sorry for all those who jobs are going to be impacted.

Finally comms from UKRI - on a Sunday evening. No mention of the hundreds of ECRs who will see their careers ended by these decisions and notably no explanation for MRC retrospectively applying cuts and wasting all the work that went into writing, reviewing and scoring applications - £millions

Missed it, thanks for pointing it out!

My hero!!! An amazing scientist and a wonderful person!

Has the MRC research funding ‘pause’ been covered by any major news network? It feels like it should be a major news story

We have a fantastic opportunity for a PhD studentship in collaboration with @jesuscollegecam.bsky.social and Cambridge Children’s Research Institute, part of the new Cambridge Children’s Hospital. Closing date 20th Feb; all the details here: www.cimr.cam.ac.uk/postgraduate...

She continues to be a lively presence at structural biology meetings. And for my money has the deepest, most intuitive understanding of protein geometry. A treasure.