Sylvia Erhardt

Not all nuclei are the same. We went to some of biology’s most exceptional nuclei 👉 dinoflagellates with genomes 80× ours 👉 Giardia’s twin nuclei 👉 ciliates carrying two nuclei in one cytoplasm & asked a simple question: what sets nuclear density? 🧵 Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Three years ago, my dad said that all fish are the same shape. Out of spite, I decided to draw all 478 families of bony fish listed in Nelson 2016. There's still some stuff I need to edit and some fish I want to redraw but, after 985 days, I finished my big dumb fish project last night.

Enormous news. A melanoma vaccine, one of the most deadly cancers out there. Science is good and helpful and there should be more of it. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

Tree House

The stunning moment when an osprey emerges from the ocean clawed onto its prey, a barracuda [📹 Mark Smith] Repost of @marktakesphoto: Original post

Chabot, B. J., Sun, R., Amjad, A., ...., Core, L., O'Neill, R. J., Mellone, B. G. (2024). Transcription of a centromere-enriched retroelement and local retention of its RNA are significant features of the CENP-A chromatin landscape. Genome Biol, 25(1):295 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Ancient Greek Coins With Octopuses 🐙

We are all looking forward to Adele joining us! Stayed tuned, more exciting announcements soon!

Celebrating the 3 amigos on their paper identifying metazoan HJURP orthologs: @jeremyahollis.bsky.social (Malik/ Campbell labs), @irinakitop.bsky.social (Nic Lehrbach lab), Jason Stonick (Cecilia Moens lab). @basicsci.fredhutch.org Mugs: sciencegrit.com Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

holy crap, this letter... "At his elementary school, when another child gets hurt, students are expected to find an adult. Someone is hurt. You get help. That’s essentially the whole semester." "I don’t merely want my son to learn how not to rape someone. I was hoping we could aim a little higher."

BREAKING: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.” More to follow.

You've seen fireworks that look like jellyfish, but what about a jellyfish that looks like fireworks? The E/V Nautilus filmed this rare Halitrephes maasi jellyfish glowing like a firework at a depth of 4,019 feet (1,225 meters) off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. (📷: Ocean Exploration Trust)

Part 151 of 200 in historically interesting things to inspire your ttrpg dnd or finding Mew under the truck by S.S. Anne (we swear) Art Deco Ingrid parfum bottle made of malachite glass by Riedel glassworks, depicting a nude under a waterfall. Bohemia, Czech Republic. 1930's

🧬 Highly related @natgenet.nature.com paper from @binzmit.bsky.social group, using nucleosome-resolution chromatin modeling: Euchromatin forms condensed domains with short active regions on the surface www.nature.com/articles/s41... Congratulations! 🎉

Super excited to share my postdoctoral work at @imbavienna.bsky.social @viennabiocenter.bsky.social - We discovered that some retrotransposons, or "jumping genes" 🧬, are able to spread from cell to cell via a new viral infectivity route. A short thread: 🧵👇 (1/7)

If anyone would like to see a short video of a deer fawn asking you to follow it to Narnia, this is your lucky day.

Happy mushroom season!

I am happy to present our work @liverworks.bsky.social @robinburns.bsky.social @alisondawnscott.bsky.social on centromeric repeat turnovers, of which we counted three in the Arabidopsis genus:

You're watching a sand bubbler crab hard at work. And bubbler crabs have one job: make balls. Lots of balls. With your mouth parts. They're filter-feeders/detrivores, combing through damp sand for microscopic food & the balls let them organize the "cleaned" sand so they don't nom it twice.

your starter pack for Single Molecule Genomics! Why you should do it (or not) - How you should do it. Collective effort with @vram142.bsky.social @stirlingchurchman.bsky.social @naltemose.bsky.social A Stergachis M Stadler W Greenleaf @embl.org rdcu.be/PmzSEV529GRa

Sharing ZATELLITE 🛰️ - a tool to visualize and manipulate repetitive loci in living cells using designer zinc fingers tinyurl.com/ZATELLITE led by Nestor Saiz, collab with Marcus Noyes, @teresadavoli.bsky.social, @glennislogsdon.bsky.social, @liamholt.bsky.social & @jefboeke.bsky.social (1/n)

Come be our colleague. I have been in this Division for 27 years (4 as a postdoc and 23 as a PI). It is an amazing place to work, collaborate, and be inspired. If you are applying to be an Assistant or Associate Professor this Fall, don't miss this deadline.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...: "...the results are a wake-up call for scientists developing biological-AI tools: they underscore the need for more rigorous performance benchmarks and for much more experimental data relating genetic sequences to biology."

Musk congratulates the extremist AfD and the AfD thanks Musk. The anti-immigrant immigrant is looking to spend $100 million in the US midterms.... Elon Musk gratuliert AfD zum Wahlsieg www.zeit.de/politik/deut...

Kurt Füchslin captured this video of frozen methane bubbles in Sihlsee (Lake Sihl) in Switzerland. Deep in the depths, bacteria break down decaying organic matter, producing bubbles of methane. As they reach the thickening surface ice, they're trapped as flammable fart pancakes/ice art.

Structure and sequence fill evolutionary gaps for essential centromeric proteins. Work by @jeremyahollis.bsky.social, @irinakitop.bsky.social, & Jason Stonick. Article by Kelsey Woodruff. www.fredhutch.org/content/www/... Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Für freien Austausch über Grenzen hinweg Wir setzen uns gemeinsam mit 22 weiteren führenden Wissenschaftsorganisationen und Wirtschaftsverbänden für den Schutz der #Wissenschaftsfreiheit ein. Das Positionspapier des Berliner Forschungsnetzwerks in voller Länge: www.berliner-forschungsnetzwerk.de

What is the sequence of events at the kinetochore? Our Spotlight article highlighting a beautiful study by Conway et al. is out now in Trends in Cell Biology! Click here for download: sl1nk.com/euzlpiq A temporal framework for error-free mitosis: Trends in Cell Biology www.cell.com/trends/cell-...

Sibylle Schleich and Aurelio Teleman @telemanlab.bsky.social identify that stress- and mitosis-induced phosphorylation of NIFK at Ser247 by p38–MSK1 and Aurora B, respectively, primes mitotic hyperphosphorylation and promotes timely mitotic entry. journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

wait, wait, what ????? protein-coding chimeric mRNAs 🤯 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🔭 The Sky Turns Above Paranal Image Credit & Copyright: Osvaldo Castillo ap260828

How do nuclear compartments form inside cell nuclei? We show RNA glues certain loci together to form a nuclear compartment. This involves special GC-rich regions of highly expressed genes that also associate with nuclear speckles, but interactions between these loci are independent of speckles!

www.unicef.org/press-releas...

‘Wings of Darkness’ is quite a shot: www.bbc.com/news/article...

"Break Free" by artist Disha Dua.

Impacts of DNA methylation on H2A.Z deposition and nucleosome stability elifesciences.org/articles/109...

First preprint from the lab 🚨 We asked when and how global chromatin organization emerges during early development 🐟

‼️🚨Out now in Molecular Cell - Our latest study 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐅𝐀𝐂𝐓 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐧𝐮𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐨𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝟑𝐝 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞: tinyurl.com/2xctvx38. It was a pleasure to lead this collaborative effort alongside @nilskrietenstein.bsky.social More in🧵below 🪡

One good reason to travel to Spain

For the past 30 years, “whole-genome sequencing” has been a misnomer. Today the T2T Consortium publishes a dozen papers heralding a future of truly complete genomes for humans and nearly any vertebrate 👨‍🔬🐒🐦🐀🦒🐎🫏🐹🐟 (sorry, no salamanders): www.cell.com/consortium/t... 🧵[1/15]

ZATELLITE: a toolkit to visualize and manipulate human centromeres in live cells using synthetic zinc fingers https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.04.742839v1

These two reviews on centromeres and kinetochores in @natrevmcb.nature.com cap off @andrea-musacchio.bsky.social sabbatical at @stanfordbiochem.bsky.social from @valleefoundation.bsky.social. Long time in the making! Non-paywall versions rdcu.be/fxD9V, rdcu.be/fxEar

in case you’re in the market: