Ray Berkeley

(Part 1/2) Excited to share our recent work with Prof. Nicolas Fawzi’s group (nicolasluxfawzi.bsky.social), now out in Angewandte Chemie (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....)! We show how RNA reshapes FUS condensate assembly and dynamics. Congrats to Tongyin, Kandarp, Samara, Qizan, Priyesh!

I’ve often said (partly tongue in cheek) that spite can be a great motivator. But mudita (freudenfeude), the ability to be truly happy for others’ success, can be a much more reliable way to have a fulfilling career. Even if it can seem that way, science is not a zero sum game. Play the long game.

Our lab's paper on the de novo design of small-molecule binding proteins is out! In it, we show how neural nets can be trained and used to design binders to drugs with very high success rates. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you missed the preprint, now is a good time to read the journal version of @grocklin.bsky.social et al’s fantastic paper on multiplexed HDX measurements Large-scale discovery, analysis and design of protein energy landscapes doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Cool figure reporting weekly commits to Google's monorepo (from this 2016 article: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...). It would be cool to see this extended to 2026!

1) The Herzik lab is excited to announce our newest preprint in collaboration with the Grotjahn lab! We have developed a surfactant cocktail that seeks to overcome one of the more nefarious problems in #cryoEM, Air-water interface (AWI)-induced damage and preferred orientation (PO).

Fun collaboration with the Herzik lab! Very cool to see #TeamTomo + STA directly capture the effects of the AWI at the single-particle level. we know it’s happening, but it’s striking to see it so clearly!

So initial experiments with Open AI's vibe-coding science tool Prism are going about as well as expected.

Excited to highlight our latest bioRxiv led by grad student Zoe Duong and Qian Shao. We report a chemistry-centric, chemoproteomics-enabled strategy to discover non-degradative molecular glues for transcriptional rewiring.
🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Very excited to share new work out today in @natchembio.nature.com on a new approach - FACES - for selectively imaging of phospholipids and other biomolecules at spatial resolutions down to individual membrane leaflets (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Thrilled to share this manuscript from my lab where we looked at how glycopolymers that compose the glycocalyx influence protein folding and protein-protein interactions via macromolecular crowding. TLDR: The Glycocalyx stabilizes protein folding and PPIs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy to share our contribution to this special issue dedicated to "Proximity-Induced Chemical Biology". We provide our take on targeted protein acetylation. Nice work Wesley and Roy! pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

New preprint from Daniel Du @fitzpatricklab.bsky.social shows #femtosecond light pulses can lens electron beams, promising higher contrast in #cryoET and better aberration correction in #cryoEM tinyurl.com/257sw7j9 Experiments made possible by support from @cziscience.bsky.social #ImagingTheFuture

This could be a good time to mention we are looking for a new Lab Manager / Postdoc for the biochemistry lab with expertise protein expression, purification, and protein NMR. Details to follow.

Mass spec/proteomics chempostdoc in the Ferguson lab, UCSD, La Jolla, CA chemsky 🧪 ⚗️ jobrxiv.org/job/universi...

Nature research paper: Structural basis for the conformational protection of nitrogenase from O2 https://go.nature.com/4aiD344

Awesome work from Sarah, @bcryo.bsky.social and friends in the Herzik Lab! It was cool to see this come together in such a short time.

Awesome application of biorthogonal chemistry to trap non-ribosomal peptide synthetase complexes for cryo-EM, out yesterday from the Burkart Lab @ucsandiego.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What do they keep in here…