The 2026 SMBE Australasian Protein Structural Phylogenetics Meeting took place last week in Brisbane (Australia) to discuss this rapidly growing field.
Thank you to all participants and congratulations to the organizing team, who brought to life a fantastic event!👏
@strphy.bsky.social
#StrPhy26
Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution
A phylogeny-aware approach to detecting amino acid coevolution: PHACE. Instead of relying on sequence alignments only, it maps substitutions onto evolutionary trees and accounts for shared ancestry. A nice step toward more accurate models of protein evolution and structure.
Caroline Puente-Lelievre
Our new algorithm PHACE: Phylogeny-Aware Detection of Molecular Coevolution, by me and Ogün Adebali (@compgenomics.bsky.social), is now published in Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Many thanks to @nehircanozdemir.bsky.social for the beautiful illustration of PHACE!
Great opportunity for anyone looking to get into science communication. Effectively communicating our research matters. It makes it accessible and useful beyond academia. It shapes public understanding, informs policy, and ensures research has real-world impact.
A new Save Science Coalition report documents 700+ science roles lost in NZ. That's a lot for a country of 5 million. Scientists are leaving for Europe, Australia and the US. NZ spends 1.4% of GDP on R&D — the OECD benchmark is 3%.
img.scoop.co.nz/media/pdfs/2...
A new tool for structural phylogenetics: Folddisco makes connecting structural conservation to evolutionary signal beyond the twilight zone of protein sequence similarity a tractable problem. #StrPhy
Commentary compiled by @smcnz.bsky.social examines New Zealand’s shift in research priorities toward advanced technologies. Perspectives highlight potential gains in innovation and competitiveness, and raise questions about funding distribution and research diversity.
APSPM brought together protein evolution research from across the globe. @jtrinidad13.bsky.social used structural homology to predict the function of uncharacterised eukaryotic proteins and revealed deep conservation hidden from sequence alone. Thank you for sharing your work with us!
#StryPhy
AlphaFold is moving beyond single proteins to predicting complexes. Millions of interactions with strong confidence. This kind of data will help uncover how protein interactions evolve, how new functions arise, and how complex biological systems are built over time. Exciting to see where this goes!
Caroline Puente-Lelievre
Nurdan Kuru
img.scoop.co.nz
Caroline Puente-Lelievre
Looking forward to working together in the future and further develop #StructuralPhylogenetics in viruses @spyroslytras.bsky.social
#StrPhy26 #StrPhy
Caroline Puente-Lelievre
Caroline Puente-Lelievre
Looking forward to presenting our work on bacterial flagella and structural phylogenetics at @biologyanu.bsky.social Protein structure+evolutionary analyses is a powerful yet underexplored combination. Come along or join on Zoom. Always happy to connect. Thanks @corrylab.bsky.social for hosting me!
Caroline Puente-Lelievre
Caroline Puente-Lelievre
Caroline Puente-Lelievre
Caroline Puente-Lelievre
@nurdankuru.bsky.social & Adebali present PHACE, a phylogeny-aware coevolution algorithm that maps amino acid substitutions onto a phylogenetic tree to detect molecular coevolution.
🔗 doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf150
#evobio #molbio #phylogenetics
Molecular Biology and Evolution
NZ’s research priorities shift towards advanced tech – Expert Reaction
Folddisco is now published @natbiotech.nature.com. It’s a fast motif search for similar 3D DISCOntinuous residues like catalytic sites or zinc fingers across the entire protein universe.
📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
💾 folddisco.foldseek.com
🌐 https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco
Join us on campus & online on Thursday, 23 April 2026 at 1pm for a seminar by Dr Caroline Puente-Lelievre, Research Fellow from the School of Biological Sciences and Centre for Computational Evolution, University of Auckland. @corrylab.bsky.social Details: rb.gy/ik3ep3
Wrapping up an incredible final day at the APSPM meeting! Huge thanks to the organizers @cpuentelelievre.bsky.social @proteinmechanic.bsky.social Jordan Douglas and all the speakers for the brilliant talks and rich discussions. Beautiful Brisbane!
#StrPhy #StrPhy26 #StructuralPhylogenetics
AlphaFold database has entered the era of complexes. Together with NVIDIA, DeepMind and EBI, we use ColabFold, OpenFold and MMseqs2-GPU to predict ~31 million complexes (homo & hetro-dimers) resulting in 1.8 million high-quality predictions
📄 research.nvidia.com/labs/dbr/ass...
🌐 alphafold.ebi.ac.uk
A new report to the Prime Minister recommends moving more of NZ's science funding into advanced technology. The recommendations, made by the PM's Science, Innovation & Technology Advisory Council, will...
What a great conference!! Leaving Brisbane inspired about the future of structural phylogenetics!
Thanks again to the organisers @cpuentelelievre.bsky.social @proteinmechanic.bsky.social and Jordan Douglas for an amazing work putting it all together!
In this talk, I will show how combining phylogenetic inference, protein structure prediction, and ancestral sequence reconstruction opens new ways to investigate how protein functions originate and di...
Paid 12-month internship: Communications Officer. We have an exciting opportunity for someone looking to take their first step into a science communication or publishing role. Based Cambridge, UK (& wfh). See the full role description for further details at biologists.com/wp-content/u...
Great to chair the session on Virus Evolution at APSPM2026. Thank you to all the speakers for sharing their cool research with us 🦠 Mihnea Bostina, Cinthy Jimenez Silva,
@spyroslytras.bsky.social @jonathonmifsud.bsky.social
#StryPhy26
