Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
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delaconcepcionjc.bsky.social
Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
@delaconcepcionjc.bsky.social
1.4K followers 870 following 87 posts
Plants, Pathogens and Procrastination
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Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
apmweber.bsky.social
AI model Helixer predicts eukaryotic genes ab initio, directly from a plain text FASTA file.

No RNA-seq.
No protein homology.
No repeats, hints, or curated evidence.

Raw genome → accurate gene models.
Deep learning + HMM, published in @natmethods.nature.com

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Helixer: ab initio prediction of primary eukaryotic gene models combining deep learning and a hidden Markov model - Nature Methods
By leveraging both deep learning and hidden Markov models, Helixer achieves broad taxonomic coverage for ab initio gene annotation of eukaryotic genomes from fungi, plants, vertebrates and invertebrat...
www.nature.com
November 26, 2025 at 6:00 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
alejofraticelli.bsky.social
Outstanding PhD fellowship call OPEN for excellent students.

lacaixafoundation.org/en/doctoral-...

This is for students incoming from outside Spain. And it is VERY well supported (ie at European levels).

If you’re interested in doing a PhD in our lab @irbbarcelona.org, reach out!!!!
Doctoral INPhINIT fellowships - Incoming Call 2026
We grant 30 fellowships for researchers of any nationality who wish to pursue a doctorate in a STEM discipline at research centres of excellence in Spain or Portugal.
www.google.com
November 26, 2025 at 7:43 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
gmivienna.bsky.social
This year’s @embo.org Workshop is held at the @viennabiocenter.bsky.social. Open to 120 participants, it is over-enrolled with 180 attendees! Thank you to the organizers @isabelmonte.bsky.social, Aino Komatsu, @moodytomato.bsky.social, and Liam Dolan for making this event possible. #EMBOplantEvo
November 25, 2025 at 3:29 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
marischuster.bsky.social
Undergrads in the UK, Ireland, Canada, and the US!

One week left to apply for a funded internship in my lab!

📌 Details below
🔁 Please repost to spread the word!
aciattoni.bsky.social Alexander Ciattoni @aciattoni.bsky.social · 20d
Undergrads from Canada, Ireland, UK, & US: Don't miss the DAAD-RISE #plantscience funded internship at @ipbhalle.bsky.social with @snp2prot.bsky.social. Apply by Nov 30th: daad.de/rise/en/rise-germany/find-an-internship 🌱
Investigating Plant Immune Proteases for Enhanced Pathogen Resistance: advertisement for the RISE-DAAD position at daad.de/rise/en/rise-germany/find-an-internship Start of the internship: between May 15 and July 15, 2026 Duration: Up to 3 months Funding: monthly scholarship of 992 € + health insurance, accident and personal liability insurance Deadline: The application must be submitted by November 30, 2025
November 23, 2025 at 11:08 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
plaschkalab.bsky.social
How does messenger RNA (mRNA) get out of the nucleus to become a protein? Eukaryotic mRNA is packaged, exported, and then translated in the cytoplasm. But how do these steps work? And what are open questions? Check out our new review for our take: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour... (1/3)
November 21, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
hernanaburbano.bsky.social
Our new collaborative work led by @taliamycota.bsky.social
Jiajun Cui & Emma Caullireau between my lab @ucllifesciences.bsky.social @cloeucl.bsky.social & the Karasov Lab (tkarasovlab.org) @uofubiology.bsky.social
and collaborators: @plantricia.bsky.social et al.

tinyurl.com/5yx2wmz5

(1/n)
November 18, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
huckelhovenr.bsky.social
TUM Offers a professorship in Crop Production. Geat opportunity!
portal.mytum.de/jobs/profess...
TUM - Professor in » Crop Production «
Studierenden- und Mitarbeiterportal der Technische Universität München
portal.mytum.de
November 20, 2025 at 3:49 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
hohmannulrich.bsky.social
Finally out in @nature.com! We uncovered a mechanistic framework for a general and conserved mRNA nuclear export pathway. www.nature.com/articles/s41.... 1/
November 19, 2025 at 11:22 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
mexpositoalonso.bsky.social
Our lab from @HHMINEWS & @UCBerkeley is looking for undergrads to come for an internship!
www.hhmi.org/programs/cec...
Summer Undergraduate Research Experience | HHMI
The Cech Fellows Program is a paid, nine-week summer research experience empowering the next generation of scientific leaders.
www.hhmi.org
November 20, 2025 at 1:59 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
janinebrunner.bsky.social
MISO: microfluidic protein isolation enables single-particle cryo-EM structure determination from a single cell colony.

Or from a single dish of HEK cell culture in the case of two membrane proteins.

Out in Nature Methods now! lnkd.in/gpyBSceg

Wonderful collaboration with the Efremov lab.
November 14, 2025 at 6:38 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
natsmb.nature.com
New online: CryoAtom improves model building for cryo-EM
CryoAtom improves model building for cryo-EM
Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Published online: 14 November 2025; doi:10.1038/s41594-025-01713-3Inspired by the advance in protein structure prediction, CryoAtom builds protein models directly from cryogenic electron microscopy maps, producing more complete models, reducing the resolution requirement and accelerating modeling.
go.nature.com
November 14, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
talyarkoni.com
the internet has decided that em-dashes are a hallmark of llm writing, which is *extremely* annoying to me, as someone who uses em-dashes all the time.

dear internet please consider the possibility that LLMs use em-dashes a lot because they're, like, good
November 14, 2025 at 6:19 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
samwalds.bsky.social
Looking to move out of the USA and to Germany for a postdoc, as you can't conduct your work in the USA under the current political restrictions? (e.g visa issues, funding cuts, etc.)
The state of Baden-Württemberg funds novel postdoc fellowships for this:
www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...
Early Career Rescue Fellowship
www.uni-konstanz.de
November 14, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
diz-lab.bsky.social
🚨 Conference alert! 🚨

Register now for next year's meeting, Mechanobiology across the tree of life! We got a fantastic line of speakers and amazing science 🤗

👇 link here 👇
www.embl.org/about/info/c...
November 14, 2025 at 8:46 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
ernstschmid.bsky.social
Thrilled to share that the final piece of my PhD work is now on bioRxiv! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... With support from @nvidia and the @NSF, we used AlphaFold to screen 1.6M+ protein pairs, revealing thousands of potential novel PPIs. All data can be viewed at predictomes.org/hp
Proteome-wide in silico screening for human protein-protein interactions
Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) drive virtually all biological processes, yet most PPIs have not been identified and even more remain structurally unresolved. We developed a two-step computational...
biorxiv.org
November 12, 2025 at 9:26 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
weiss-lab.bsky.social
The Center for Microscopy and Image Analysis at the University of Zurich is seeking a new Head:

jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie...

It is super fun to work with them, tons of expertise and cutting edge instrumentation in ❄️🔬
Application deadline: December 15, 2025.
UZH: Head of the Center for Microscopy and Image Analysis (Core Facility)
The Center for Microscopy and Image Analysis (ZMB) is a nationally and internationally recognized Core Facility at the University of Zurich (UZH), providing access to state-of-the-art light and electr...
jobs.uzh.ch
November 12, 2025 at 6:42 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
pedrobeltrao.bsky.social
957 proposals were submitted in the latest round of ERC Synergy applications. They expect to fund 50 which means around 5% success rate. This is really not sustainable and a lot of people are likely avoiding doing this knowing how poor the chances are.
erc.europa.eu/news-events/...
Applications for ERC Synergy Grants 2026: Facts and figures
The ERC Synergy Grants 2026 call closed for applications on 5 November 2025. These are the preliminary data on the submitted proposals:
erc.europa.eu
November 11, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
kamounlab.bsky.social
Do a predoc, young grasshoppers!https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/do-a-predoc-young-people-155c32d094a @adnroide
November 11, 2025 at 11:31 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
thanbichlerlab.bsky.social
📢 Postdoc position: Biochemistry & Bacterial cell biology

in our group at Marburg University, Germany, funded by the ERC Advanced Grant "C-SWITCH"

🔗More information at shorturl.at/OlvlL
📅Deadline: Nov 30, 2025

Please repost. #Postdoc
November 10, 2025 at 6:15 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
gmivienna.bsky.social
New paper! Work led by @p-bourguet.bsky.social and Frédéric Berger at the GMI of the @oeaw.bsky.social and @esasaki007.bsky.social identified how protein CDCA7 helps plants stably maintain epigenetic modifications across generations.

Read more: www.oeaw.ac.at/gmi/detail/n...
November 7, 2025 at 10:33 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
buzzbaum.bsky.social
We have wondered what a complex archaeal cell might look like ever since 2014. It’s been a long road (and the journey is far from over), but it’s a good time to pause for breath and look. These Asgard archaeal cells are a surprise! And that is the joy of being a cell biologist.
November 7, 2025 at 11:02 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
p-bourguet.bsky.social
How is epigenetic information inherited? We found that CDCA7 proteins are critical players in the inheritance of DNA methylation at CG sites in plants, and this is true both in the lab and in the wild. How does this work? 🧵👇
gmivienna.bsky.social Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology @gmivienna.bsky.social · 19d
New paper! Work led by @p-bourguet.bsky.social and Frédéric Berger at the GMI of the @oeaw.bsky.social and @esasaki007.bsky.social identified how protein CDCA7 helps plants stably maintain epigenetic modifications across generations.

Read more: www.oeaw.ac.at/gmi/detail/n...
November 7, 2025 at 5:05 PM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
tbharat-lab.bsky.social
An Asgard archaeon with internal membrane compartments

Brilliant study led by @fmacleod.bsky.social and Andriko von Kügelgen. Tight collaboration with @buzzbaum.bsky.social and lab. Congrats to all authors!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
November 7, 2025 at 10:44 AM
Reposted by Juan Carlos De la Concepcion
impvienna.bsky.social
New paper alert! Scientists in Clemens Plaschka’s lab at the IMP and @juliusbrennecke.bsky.social's lab at
@imbavienna.bsky.social solved a decade-old puzzle, uncovering how the information molecule mRNA travels from the cell’s nucleus to its periphery. More: bit.ly/4nHcvys
November 6, 2025 at 4:04 PM