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Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬

@madic.bsky.social

2.4K followers 1.6K following 230 posts

Shooting electrons, ions and photons (mainly) at plants to study cell-cell communication @mpibiochem.bsky.social & @hhu.de

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Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · Jul 26

New preprint: In situ Architecture of #Plasmodesmata.

Using #cryoET, #AlphaFold & proteomics, we uncover the native organization of plant intercellular nanopores.

🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

🧪🧵1/n
#teamtomo #PlantScience #Physcomitrium #Arabidopsis #cryoEM

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Reposted by Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬

Kenneth Ehses @denkenny.bsky.social · 2h

✨Excited that the main project of my PhD is now available as a pre-print on #bioRxiv

Here, we used #CryoET to visualise mitochondrial proteostatic stress and together with SPA #CryoEM shed light into the functional cycle of the Hsp60:10 chaperone system. #TeamTomo

🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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Reposted by Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬

Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 1d

New blog post. In which I analyze the new HHMI announcement and what it means for the science publishing ecosystem openrxiv.org/preprint-man...

Preprint mandates gather momentum - openRxiv

By Richard Sever, PhD. Chief Science & Strategy Officer, openRxiv Preprints speed up science by enabling researchers to disseminate reports of new findings immediately. They also represent a simple wa...

openrxiv.org

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Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · 22h

No didn't look yet. Was thinking to pull one by one via uniprot ID (sequence and MSA), but agree a full db would be nice.

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · 1d

Could pull MSAs from the DB now and save couple hours of CPU time.

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · 1d

You can get MSAs directly from AlphaFold DB now (alphafold.ebi.ac.uk). I also missed the FoldSeek implementation, which lets you search for structurally similar proteins direktly.

This saves some clicking around. Neat!

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Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · 10d

Mhh, shouln't the meme be the other way round? Especially with new algos and the immense GPU/HPC tech they require.

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · 11d

Haha yes! Some more contenders in rod outer segments, paracrystalline arrays in mitos and ER, funky OSER forms. But hard to argue with stacks of pancakes sustaining global oxygen and food supply🥞🏆

From Borgese et al. 2006
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ceb.2006.06.008

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Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · 12d

123 new genomes you say?

Time to update some sequence alignments 🥲

Stefan A. Rensing @rensingstefan.bsky.social · 13d

Here's 123 new bryophyte genomes for you!
Apparently, bryophytes time and again include microbial genes in their genomic repertoire, and occupy a langer gene space than vascular plants.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Bryophytes hold a larger gene family space than vascular plants - Nature Genetics

A super-pangenome analysis incorporating 123 newly sequenced bryophyte genomes reveals that bryophytes exhibit a larger number of unique and lineage-specific gene families than vascular plants.

www.nature.com

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · 12d

Thylakoids, the prettiest membrane structures in planty cryoET, in full glory:

Ben Engel @cellarchlab.com · 13d

Time for a thread!🧵 How different is the molecular organization of thylakoids in “higher” plants🌱? To find out, we teamed up with @profmattjohnson.bsky.social to dive into spinach chloroplasts with #CryoET ❄️🔬. Curious? ..Read on!

#TeamTomo #PlantScience 🧪 🧶🧬 🌾
elifesciences.org/articles/105...
1/🧵

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Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · 13d

This is the way!
Next step: incentives for reviewing preprints.

Richard Sever @richardsever.bsky.social · 14d

HHMI adopts Plan U journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Reposted by Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬

Caitie McCafferty @computingcaitie.bsky.social · 15d

I am excited to share our new preprint on the CAGE complex, a mysterious hollow protein complex that I first saw years ago while surveying Tetrahymena ciliary lysate www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #cilia #protistsonsky 🧬🧪

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Reposted by Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬

bioRxiv Biophysics @biorxiv-biophys.bsky.social · 19d

Correlative MS Imaging for cellular identification and analysis of in situ cryo-ET https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.16.676641v1

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Reposted by Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬

Simon Dürr @handle.invalid · 27d

La-Proteina from NVidia to do co-design of fully atomistic protein structures (sequence + side-chains + backbone) for up to 800 residues is now open source with permissive licensing

🖥️ github.com/NVIDIA-Digit...
🗎 arxiv.org/abs/2507.09466

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Reposted by Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬

Paul & Virginie - Centriole Lab @centriolelab.bsky.social · Aug 28

Trouble imaging actin in ExM? Meet HAK-Actin, a probe for U-ExM, cryo-ExM & iU-ExM. Enables post-expansion labeling for max signal. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Soon at @spirochrome.com
Led by O.Mercey and @lreymond.bsky.social, in collab with @dudinlab.bsky.social and @marinelap.bsky.social

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Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · Aug 25

H2B-mRFPruby, scale bar: 20µm
#live-imaging

eLife @elife.bsky.social · Aug 25

Scientists present an advanced new technique for live-imaging regenerating limbs, shown here on a sand flea.
buff.ly/WsOrSlR

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · Aug 15

Haha, agreed! 😁✌️

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · Aug 15

Awesome, congrats Kate! And thanks for taking the time to share advice with pesky non-aussie students as well;)

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Reposted by Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬

Michael Hothorn @structplantbio.bsky.social · Aug 9

Our latest on brassinosteroid signaling: Ligand binding spectrum, specificity & selectivity of all BR receptors in Arabidopsis. By @albertocaregnato.bsky.social , @hmchen93.bsky.social and our great chemistry collaborators Mirek Kvasnica, Jana Oklestkova and Mirek Strnad.

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Reposted by Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬

Pedro Beltrao @pedrobeltrao.bsky.social · Jul 22

Unexpectedly, @jurgjn.bsky.social found that running Alphafold3 predictions for protein interactions can yield ipTM scores that are more predictive of true interactions when run in pools of proteins instead of pairwise predictions. Presumably, this reflects some sort of "competition effect".

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Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · Aug 3

Thanks Ben, that means a lot!
You heard this before but you guys checking in on us helped immensely to keep it going. To more #teamtomo 🤝 #PlantScience (and other photosynthetic critters) 🥂

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · Aug 2

Uh-oh.

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · Aug 1

Yupp, same issue. Embedding font didn't help. In the end, I folded and changed everything to boring arial.

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · Aug 1

Another plant glutamate receptor (GLR) involved in defense response via calcium signaling. This one senses insect eggs. Pretty cool!

Maria Mineiro @mariamnro.bsky.social · Jul 27

How do plants detect insect eggs ? 🌱🦋
Our new paper on GLR2.7 and its role in plant defense responses to insect eggs is now out in @newphyt.bsky.social
Big thanks to the Reymond Lab @unil.bsky.social and our collaborators !

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The glutamate receptor‐like GLR2.7 modulates insect egg‐induced defense responses in Arabidopsis

Upon perception of insect eggs, Arabidopsis thaliana activates a generic immune response that culminates in cell death (hypersensitive-like response (HR-like)). While this response can subsequently .....

nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · Aug 1

Very nice, congrats! The GUS and iGluSnFR patterns are beautiful.

Marcel Dickmanns | 🌿❄️🔬 @madic.bsky.social · Jul 29

Thanks a lot! Frequently stared at your ET data when we were trying to make sense of the features - beautiful paper leading the way.