We chat about a revolving door of consortium meetings for Jaime, follow up on the OMB proposed rule, two mini-protein kinase preprints, and differences between blogs and scholarly work.Preprints/Blogs:De novo design of selective kinase modulatorsSelective miniprotein inhibitors of Aurora-A kinase designed using interaction-motif scaffoldingEnsemble refinement produces consistent R-free values but smaller ensemble sizes than previously reportedNews Links:Bethesda Declaration one year laterThe Public Rejects OMB's Federal Financial Assistance Rule

We chat about the conformational ensembles conference, NIH-proposed policy changes, 4!! preprints, & running. NIH news:OMB Proposal Blog Post Summary on OMB ProposalRFI to Cap the Number of Simultaneous Research Project Grants Early Independence AwardPreprints:Detection of residual native state entropy changes upon mutation in Fyn SH3Protein-ligand binding kinetics are primarily controlled by the protein, not the ligandESMFold2sampleworks: A Modular Platform for Experimentally Guided Biomolecular Ensemble Generation

NIH Strategic Plan Comments (Due 5/26)Preprint: Cooling fast and slow: Characterising the effects of vitrification in cryo-EM and the subsequent recovery of equilibrium populationscryoAgent: An agentic workflow for robust and adaptive end-to-end cryo-EM image processingYou need to make AI guidelines for your labWe’re Training Scientists for a World That No Longer Exists

diffUSE ProjectApril Fools Blog NIH News:Funding CurveDrug Monkey 2025 Grant ReportHow the 2025 NIH grant terminations varied by researchers’ demographic groupsPreprints: Intrinsic dataset features drive mutational effect prediction by protein language modelsRibosome Molecular Aging Shapes Translation DynamicsAI Grad Student:Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate studentVibe physics: The AI grad student

Topics:OlympicsNIH Bureaucracy - Grants & LeadershipsPreprints12 episodes of TTPD! Claude Code & Slack AppsSan Francisco HalfPreprints: Bidirectional allosteric ligand regulation in a central glycolytic enzyme Large-scale exploration of protein space by automated NMR

Preprints:Improving Cryo-EM Optimization Robustness with an Optimal Transport Loss Function for Noisy ImagesProtein folding success depends on the direction and speed of polypeptide chain appearanceJeremy Reiter's gene list

Year in Review & 2026 PredictionsPreprints:Rewriting protein alphabets with language modelsFine-tuning protein language models on human spatial constraint yields state-of-the-art variant effect predictionPrachee Avasthi Blog Post:How to Not Make a Scientific Journal by Accident

Topics:Government Shutdown/ReopeningTravels The impact of Jane RichardsonAI Peer Review toolsPreprint 1: Hit or Miss: Understanding Emergence and Absence of Homo-oligomeric Contacts in Protein Language ModelsThe Drain of Scientific Publishing Big experiments are only big if they can fail

Topics:Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher EducationGovernment ShutdownHHMI's new open science policiesShrinking PhD poolsThe Nobel PrizesThe BearTLOS ReactionsPreprint: Experiment-guided AlphaFold3 resolves accurate protein ensembles

Latest News:-H1B changes & chaos-Who determines what gets into Pubmed (Literature Selection Technical Review Committee) Preprints:Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language modelsImproved cryo-EM reconstruction of sub-50 kDa complexes using 2D template matching High-resolution ab initio reconstruction enables cryo-EM structure determination of small particles (See great biorxiv comment on the paper!)