EMBL trains scientists, students & visitors at all levels.
For our
#EMBL50
celebration, we’d love to hear your stories of training at EMBL.
Are you a current or former EMBL fellow? Have you attended an EMBL course or teacher training?
Tell us using
#EMBL50
& tagging us
@EMBL
.
EMBL and
@DeepMind
have partnered – a breakthrough for science.
Together, we're providing a treasure trove of protein structure predictions powered by
#AlphaFold
to herald a new era for
#AI
-enabled biology.
In recognition of Suzanne Eaton's contributions to science, her years at EMBL, and the tragic circumstances of her death, the EMBL flags will be flown at half-mast today.
Suzanne's passion, leadership, mentorship & scientific acumen will be deeply missed.
Happy
#DNA
day. The structure of DNA was first published
#OnThisDay
in 1953. The famous X-ray diffraction pattern imaged by Rosalind Franklin's PhD student Raymond Gosling is nicknamed Photo 51
📷: Raymond Gosling/King's College London
“I raise my hand for a better world. As a scientist, I have the privilege to pursue my dreams; as a woman, I have the duty to fight for others to be able to pursue theirs.” – EMBL Director General Edith Heard
#ChooseToChallenge
DeepMind and EMBL-EBI have released the predicted structures of over 200 million proteins covering almost every organism that has had its genome sequenced.
These are now openly available to the scientific community via the AlphaFold Database.
Before a
#fruitfly
takes its first step, its cells have already travelled great distances to form future body patterns and structures. The coordinated movements of cell nuclei can be seen here, as the
#embryo
developed into larvae over 15h.
🔬: Hufnagel lab
Merry microscopic Christmas!
Clumped up proteins from fruit flies glow in festive form. In this composition of Drosophila cells you can see the cytoskeleton protein tubulin (grey/red), DNA (blue/yellow) and an overexpressed protein tagged with GFP (green).
📷: Catarina Carmo
Today, 18 teams made up of EMBL staff and visitors are climbing & descending the ATC helix a total of 58 times to simulate climbing Mont Blanc.
The teams are raising money for charity.
Superheroes of the life sciences.
Model organisms have helped us understand the function of genes, proteins and metabolic pathways.
#biology
#research
📷 EMBL / Daniel Krüger
#OnThisDay
in 1852, Santiago Ramón y
#Cajal
was born, the father of modern neuroscience. He was also an artist, photographer, doctor, bodybuilder, chess player & publisher.
Read more in this feature by the New York Times:
#OTD
📷 and illustration by Cajal
EMBL Director General Edith Heard has been appointed to a new high-level
@WHO
advisory council. The WHO Science Council will advise the international body on science, research, and innovation priorities.
To start the year, EMBL welcomes Edith Heard as its new Director General:
“As a deeply committed citizen of Europe, I will endeavour to promote the scientific excellence and service to the scientific community that characterise EMBL.”
EMBL scientists often colour different kinds of eggs to the ones you might see this Easter. As this fertilised mouse egg cell divides & contracts, the cells that 'dance' their way to the centre develop into the embryo, the outer cells become the placenta. 📷 Jean-Léon Maître/EMBL
Complete your PhD at one of EMBL’s six sites across Europe!
The EMBL International PhD Programme is open for applications until 13 October 2020.
#PhD
#research
Important information about applying can be found here:
The inside of a living cell can be extremely crowded - as you can see here. This cross-section of a high pressure frozen HeLa cell was acquired in a Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscope.
📸: Anna Steyer / EMBL
#OnThisDay
in 1902 the
#NobelLaureate
Barbara McClintock was born. She was a pioneer in chromosome research earning the Nobel prize (1983) for her discovery of transposable elements in maize. Her research efforts extend far & wide.
#OTD
📸
@SmithsonianArch
EMBL embarks on a new era of molecular biology.
EMBL research will expand to study life in context – from molecules to ecosystems. Broad in scope, our next programme encompasses fundamental research, services & multidisciplinary collaboration.
Join EMBL to complete your PhD at one of our six sites across Europe!
The EMBL International PhD Programme is open for applications until 9 October 2023.
#PhD
#research
Important information about the application process can be found here:
Edith Heard, Director General of EMBL, in the New York Times Visionaries series:
“You can define success by how much you’ve allowed a new generation of science to happen.”
Sinem Saka, one of EMBL’s newest group leaders, creates new tools & methods to find the solutions to biological puzzles.
It’s next-level problem solving to unlock molecular information with cutting-edge technology. Welcome to EMBL, Sinem!
Julia Mahamid has been awarded the 2023 EMBO gold medal for research in structural biology, developing powerful techniques that visualise cellular machinery in situ.
Congratulations!
Judith Zaugg, Group Leader at EMBL Heidelberg, and at MMPU, has been awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant.
She will receive €2M over the next 5 years to investigate interactions between leukemia cells and their niche within the human bone marrow.
#ERCCoG
The first snow has arrived!
Many of our EMBL Heidelberg staff are still working from home and won't see their snow-covered site in-person today, so we are sharing these photos here for everyone's enjoyment. ❄️
📸Kinga Lubowiecka/EMBL
Congratulations to Anne Ephrussi!
Anne has been awarded the German Feldberg Prize 2022 for her research on how RNA molecules are transported and their translation regulated in animal development.
This may look like another video of a dividing cell, but there's a catch. These chromosomes (red) are being pulled apart by the spindle (green), but it's not a cell, because there's no cell membrane. This technique was developed by Ivo Telley and colleagues at EMBL in 2013
EMBL congratulates Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for the 2020
#NobelPrize
in Chemistry for their research CRISPR–Cas9-mediated gene editing.
@nobelprize
#chemnobel
The platypus has five pairs of sex chromosomes.
One pair is similar to the single pair of sex-determination chromosomes found in humans, and another is similar to that found in birds.
Read more
#genome
facts here:
👨🎨 Spencer Phillips / EMBL-EBI
The
@EU_Commission
has officially established
@EuroBioImaging
as an European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC).
Euro-Bioimaging provides life scientists with
#openaccess
to a range of technologies & resources in biological and biomedical imaging:
EMBL is happy to celebrate International Day of LGBTQ+ people in STEM by raising the EMBL Progress Rainbow Flag.
EMBL supports all diversity in STEM and encourages its LGBTQ+ group, its community and allies.
#LGBTSTEMDay
@embl
Anne Ephrussi retired from EMBL after a 32-year career doing key RNA research while leading a trailblazing postdoc programme.
Looking back, she supplied a few stories & a lot of insights into what she’s learned along the way. Read about it here:
#EMBL50
Scientists
@emblebi
analysed >4700 SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences & found that many of the most interesting changes reported so far are likely to be technical artefacts, rather than biological mutations.
🧬
EMBL’s Eileen Furlong, Chair of the Equality and Diversity Committee and Head of the Genome Biology Unit, responds to the recent Nature Comms paper on the potential effects of mentor–mentee relationships.
Happy New Year!
For EMBL, 2024 is an important milestone: our 50th anniversary!
This year we’ll share stories from our past, and, importantly, report on our work that advances life sciences & continues to push the frontiers of molecular biology.
Join us in celebrating
#EMBL50
!
Congratulations to Dr Alexander Aulehla on his appointment as Head of EMBL’s Developmental Biology Unit.
The unit aims to understand the general principles and mechanisms underlying the emergence of complexity in developing organisms.
#OnThisDay
in 1980, Christiane Niisslein-Volhard & Eric Wieschaus published work that would go on to revolutionise the field of developmental genetics. They were both awarded the
@NobelPrize
in Physiology or Medicine in 1995 for this work.
@NatureNews
#OTD
#NobelPrize
#Nobel
Welcome to EMBL, Gautam Dey!
The new group leader is fascinated by the evolutionary origins of nuclear organisation & architecture, and is looking forward to making the most of EMBL’s interdisciplinary strengths.
EMBL Director General recognised alongside four other exceptional women in the life sciences, winning the L’Oréal–UNESCO For Women in Science Award.
👩🔬
Kristina Djinović-Carugo has been officially appointed as the next Head of EMBL Grenoble.
The Slovenian structural biologist will take over leadership of the site from Stephen Cusack in July.
Welcome to EMBL, Nicoletta Petridou!
How do organisms take shape? The Petridou group is trying to better understand how complexity emerges during early embryo development in zebrafish.
Today is International Day of Women and Girls in Science!
Celebrate
#WomenInScience
by taking a photo, tagging female colleagues & collaborators you admire & posting using
#WomenOfEMBL
💚🎉
Congratulations to Gautam Dey, Svetlana Dodonova, and Michael Zimmermann, who have been awarded the ERC Starting Grant.
They will receive €1.5 million each to pursue their research over the next five years.
Join EMBL to complete your PhD at one of our six sites across Europe!
The EMBL International PhD Programme is open for applications until 13 April 2021.
#PhD
#research
Important information about the application process can be found here:
Join EMBL to complete your PhD at one of our six sites across Europe!
The EMBL International PhD Programme is open for applications until 4 October 2022.
#PhD
#research
Important information about the application process can be found here:
Today is
#WorldBookDay
! 📗
A shout-out to
@wolfgangkhuber
and Susan Holmes for writing their book 'Modern Statistics for Modern Biology', and making it freely available online for scientists & teachers worldwide:
(for print: )
Today Fabiola Gianotti DG
@CERN
visited the EMBL Heidelberg site to meet with Edith Heard DG
@EMBL
.
Pictured here with the "Science is for Everyone" sticker, celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
#WomenInScience
#WomenOfEMBL
#WomenOfCERN
Past, present, and future EMBLers: let's celebrate the
#WomenOfEMBL
we admire as part of International Day of Women & Girls in Science.
Tomorrow, use
#WomenOfEMBL
&
#WomenInScience
to let us know who inspires you!
EMBL Director General Edith Heard has been elected to the prestigious US National Academy of Sciences. The distinction recognises scientists around the world for contributions to scientific research.
Welcome to EMBL Rome, Ana Boskovic!
The new group leader will study how embryos can inherit non-genetic information that causes stable and heritable effects – a process known as epigenetic inheritance.
The EMBL Interdisciplinary Postdocs programme is now open for applications!
EIPOD4 offers talented early career researchers the possibility to engage in ambitious, interdisciplinary research projects, involving two or more EMBL group leaders.
Learn more:
AI-based protein structure prediction has been named 2021 'Breakthrough of the Year' by Science Magazine!
The public
#AlphaFold
database hosted
@emblebi
together with
@DeepMind
already holds 800,000 structure predictions & keeps growing.
Drosophila embryo: a microtubule growth marker (EB1-EGFP) allows us to measure growth rate, alignment & organisation in living embryos, useful for learning about the regulation of essential processes for cell life.
🎥 Dimitri Kromm & Juan Manuel Gomez Elliff/EMBL
Only one week left to apply to our International PhD Programme!
#PhD
#research
Join EMBL to complete your PhD at one of our six sites across Europe.
All the relevant information can be found here:
ERC has awarded its prestigious Synergy Grant to Vikas Trivedi
@EMBLBarcelona
and others
@CRGenomica
&
@CNRS
.
With >€10 million for their 'Breakdance' project, the scientists will study underlying mechanisms that determine an animal's body plan.
10 years ago EMBL's Advanced Training Centre opened on our campus in Heidelberg. Even after a decade, the view of the futuristic ATC building fascinates us every day!
Also see this time lapse of the construction process
#throwback
#onthisday
#architecture
Congratulations to EMBL senior scientist & group leader Nassos Typas, who’s been awarded the
@VAAM_Microbes
Research Award for his innovative and creative research.
Viruses don't discriminate, societies and systems do.
Join prominent scientific leaders discussing the disproportionate impact of
#COVID19
on women & single-parent scientists on 9 Sept 2020 at this EMBL Virtual Conference:
#wiscovid19
#WomenInScience
We’re excited to launch the Traversing European Coastlines expedition today.
TREC is a pan-European, cross-disciplinary expedition to study coastal ecosystems and their response to the environment, on scales from molecules to communities.
#EMBLtrec
First open user call for the EMBL Imaging Centre!
EMBL’s new service facility for imaging is ready to offer external users high quality access and support. Researchers are encouraged to contact the EMBL IC team to discuss opportunities.
Congratulations to our Director General Edith Heard on receiving an Honorary Doctorate from
@Cambridge_Uni
!
A recognition of Edith’s epigenetics & developmental biology work powered by her relentless curiosity to understand life at different levels, from molecules to ecosystems.
We congratulate EMBL Director General Edith Heard on being elected a member of the Max Planck Society’s Senate.
She joins the Senate alongside EMBL alumni & Nobel Laureates Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
@MPI_for_DB
& Stefan W. Hell
@mpi_bpc
, & 9 others.
Congratulations to EMBL Group Leader and Senior Scientist Nassos Typas!
He was awarded the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences 2022 from the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller.
@TypasLab
@EMBLHeidelberg
@Fondation_BS
Every year, EMBO recognises outstanding researchers in the
#lifesciences
.
Congratulations to EMBL's Alexander Aulehla & Paul Flicek for being elected as new
@EMBO
members by their peers!
#EMBOMember
#ScienceAward
🎉
In my first year at Cambridge, I also took biology as part of the Natural Sciences course – I'd never seen a cell before, I didn't know what a nucleus was, and I had a real ‘wow’ moment! Life is beautiful and striving to understand it, as a scientist, is an incredible privilege.
EMBL group leaders Julia Mahamid, Anna Kreshuk & Jonas Ries have been awarded a
@cziscience
grant to advance what we can see inside cells.
Their project aims to combine cryo-electron tomography, machine learning & super-resolution light microscopy.
Rita Levi-Montalcini, who started a new era in developmental biology, would have celebrated her 112th birthday today.
Learn more about Rita's pioneering work & how passion, persistence, and creativity helped her overcome the obstacles on her path:
Congratulations to EMBL Director General Edith Heard for being elected a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina!
Heard is the 6th EMBL scientist to join the Leopoldina, the world’s oldest continuously existing scientific academy.
Time to go home: EMBL Picture of the Week
The sun sets over the French alps at EMBL Grenoble marking the end of another day of research in the lab.
👉🏼
📸 Zuzanna Kaczmarska / EMBL
The
#AlphaFold
database now contains thousands of protein structure predictions relevant for neglected tropical diseases, incl. leprosy, river blindness & Buruli ulcer.
A data treasure trove for research on these overlooked medical conditions.
#beatNTD
EMBL is delighted to welcome Estonia as its newest member!
Estonia becomes EMBL’s 28th member state, joining a large & dynamic life-science community.
We are committed to strengthening Europe’s life science community.
Find out more:
The central dogma of molecular biology: EMBL Pic of the Week
Biological information flow – from DNA to mRNA to protein – depicted in a single structure. EMBL’s Mahamid group used cryo-electron tomography to determine the structure in bacterial cells.
EMBL congratulates Svante Pääbo on the 2022
#NobelPrize
in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.
@nobelprize
#mednobel
This time-lapse shows a crucial step in the early development of a fruit fly embryo.
A furrow forms on its ventral side – & gastrulation begins.
The embryo expresses a green fluorescent protein optogenetic module & a membrane marker, visible using confocal
#microscopy
🔬
Congratulations to Miki Ebisuya, group leader
@EMBLBarcelona
, on receiving an
@ERC_research
Consolidator Grant!
Over the next five years, it will support Miki’s research on the biochemical mechanisms that determine how fast mammalian embryos develop.
Want to learn more about EMBL's unique post-doctoral programme?
The EMBL Interdisciplinary Postdoc programme will open for applications soon. Join us for a webinar on Friday 29 May (10:00 CEST) to learn more about this opportunity:
Scientists have conducted one of the largest
#CRISPR
screens of
#cancer
genes to date to prioritise therapeutic targets:
They disrupted every gene in over 300 cancer models from 30 cancer types to uncover which genes are critical for cancer survival
The EMBL Interdisciplinary Postdoc programme is now open for applications!
This unique
#postdoc
programme, includes 3 yrs of funding, travel & accom support + training, public engagement, career development & mentoring opportunities.
#EIPOD4
Apply now:
The TREC expedition is starting!
EMBL researchers and partners are collecting the first samples in Roscoff, France to kick off the two-year mission!
Want to keep up with the expedition? Follow us on
@EMBLtrec
.
#EMBLtrec
Antimicrobial resistance is a major emerging global threat, and novel drug combinations are a promising approach for countering it.
In a new study, EMBL scientists have profiled 10,000+ drug combinations for their effect on key gram-positive bacteria.
Congratulations to EMBL scientists Anna Kreshuk, Claire Deo, Robert Prevedel, and Christian Tischer on being recognised by the
@ChanZuckerberg
Initiative for their multidisciplinary & collaborative research advancing biological imaging technology!
The first stages of mammalian life revolve around cell division. Here you see a live imaging series of the very early development of a mouse, showing cell membranes in blue and cell nuclei in red (cross sections in the bottom row).
📷: Manuel Eguren, postdoc Ellenberg group
Congratulations to Jamie Hackett on being awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant!
His group at EMBL Rome will receive 2M over the next 5 years to investigate how chromatin modifications in specific contexts influence gene expression.
Congratulations to EMBL group leader Julia Mahamid!
Julia receives the German Society for Electron Microscopy’s Ernst Ruska Prize 2021, shared with David A. Muller
@CornellEng
, for advancing cellular electron tomography.
Read more about Julia's work:
Congratulations to this year's awardees:
Ernst Ruska Prize 2021 for Dr. Julia Mahamid and Prof. David A. Muller
Harald Rose Prize for Prof. Joachim Mayer.
Find more information here:
Happy Birthday to Janet Thornton, Director Emeritus & Senior Scientist
@emblebi
For her services to
#bioinformatics
, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2012.
Listen to the recent interview w/ Thornton from
@WomenMW
#February11
is
@UN
International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
We’re celebrating the extraordinary and inspiring women – past and present – at EMBL by sharing their learnings and advice:
#WomeninScience
Congratulations to Jordi van Gestel and Maria Zimmermann-Kogadeeva!
The EMBL Heidelberg group leaders are among the recipients of ERC Starting Grants
#ERCStG
.
Read more about their projects:
Find the RNA structures you’re looking for!
Researchers
@emblebi
and colleagues have developed R2DT – a new user-friendly software for visualising 2D RNA structures.
Check it out: