The Vienna BioCenter Summer School 2026 call is now open for talented undergrads, it's a great opportunity for students who are interested in graduate study in the life sciences. Please RT
https://training.vbc.ac.at/summer-school/
How do sperm and egg fuse? Surprisingly, we still don’t fully know…
Our field has uncovered many pieces of the fertilization puzzle, but not how they fit together.
We identify ✨ SPARK ✨ - a conserved sperm complex that couples sperm-egg binding to fusion.
tinyurl.com/34cm4xat
Read on! 🧵👇
Loving today's news that the mysterious "fedora man" outside the Louvre heist was actually a 15-year-old museum visitor who dresses like a 1940s French detective all the time, just because. apnews.com/article/louv...
Read the full story in our preprint! 👇
biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Excited to share this work with my co-first author Kevin Sabath - a fantastic collaboration between the
@alex-stark.bsky.social and @plaschkalab.bsky.social labs! 🤝🧪
Do transcriptional activators work on any promoter? Our data says no. 🙅♂️
Despite driving ~2/3 of mammalian genes, CpG island (CGI) promoters have remained a puzzle. We identified >50 activators that are exclusively compatible with this promoter class. 🧬
Using Hcfc1 as a model, we show it functions as a molecular bridge: it connects CGI-bound TFs directly to TFIID. This recruitment overcomes a rate-limiting step unique to CGI promoters, enabling transcription initiation. 🧬🌉
Could one envision a synthetic receptor technology that is fully programmable, able to detect diverse extracellular antigens – both soluble and cell-attached – and convert that recognition into a wide range of intracellular responses, from gene expression and real-time fluorescence to modulation..