Chemist at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus. Passionate about designing, building, and giving away fluorescent dyes to illuminate biological systems. Striving to be positive about all things chemistry (except ChemDraw).
ORCID: 0000-0002-0789-6343
Luke Lavis
What is the computational role of dendritic excitations? Byung Hun Lee and team mapped voltage dynamics throughout the dendritic trees of CA1 pyramidal neurons in mice navigating in virtual reality. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Thanks, as always, to @rhodamine110.bsky.social for hooking us up with buckets of JaneliaFluor-HaloTag ligand dyes.
Excited to share our new paper and lipid- and protein-directed photocatalytic labeling method (POCA) just out in @natchembio.nature.com. tinyurl.com/2kcxuvvv. Big congrats to first author Andrew Becker and the whole team for launching our lab into the wild world of singlet oxygen interactomics.
Registration for THE chemical biology conference of 2026 is now open! EMBO ChemBio 2026 in Heidelberg
DeGrado, Arikin, Picotti (Keynotes). @lmkdassama.bsky.social @brianliau.bsky.social @rhodamine110.bsky.social @benlehner.bsky.social @alitavassoli.bsky.social
www.embl.org/about/info/c...
The NMR section is my favorite.
And this one took a while—736 days. I wrote about why there is more behind this paper than the chemistry. communities.springernature.com/posts/736-days
Out in @natmethods.nature.com: More dyes. They work. Quite well. And blink. Pick the one that fits your target, your technique, and your labeling density. With too many collaborators and institutes to list, but anchored at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The best two years you can spend before graduate school! Get the hands of a 4th-year grad student contributing to Open Science: bit.ly/47mU5xx Or join an interdisciplinary AI/biology team (don't worry, the AI still needs you to do the actual experiments): bit.ly/4taqzni Both at Janelia!
Got the last word in this great perspective on the state of fluorescent indicators in @nature.com by @dianakwon.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Cool paper using a new JF derivative to map synaptic proteins. And AI didn't like the generality of our general synthetic methods section (that we've used for years), so we expanded them from 2 succinct paragraphs to 1.5 gloriously unreadable pages. Better than Ambien. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A series of spontaneously blinking dyes in the far-red range facilitate single-molecule localization microscopy. These dyes vary in their blinking properties and can be matched to the applications and...
