Prof. Chen Ning Yang, a world-renowned physicist, Nobel Laureate in Physics, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor at Tsinghua University, and Honorary Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University, passed away in Beijing due to illness

Huge congratulations to Wieczorek Lab PhD student Bin Cai and now-PI Jingwei Xu @xujw_thu on figuring out the surprisingly complex structure of the A-C linker crosslinking microtubule triplets in Tetrahymena basal body centrioles!

Limited by the short basal body/data size, for now we could not provide structural details at molecular detail, as what we did for EPC samples. Still working on that~ https://t.co/3KLLB0G848

This of course is not only limited to Plasmodium, its close relative Toxoplama also have singlets centrioles, as shown in our previous work. https://t.co/2p0ObuZ3qx

We usually learn that centrioles/basal bodies are made of microtubule triplets. But our work on Plasmodium shows its basal body is built from singlets, which then mature into the doublets of a functional cilium. #TEAMTOMO

Detailed protocol for our lift-out approach, as demonstrated with liver tissue.

📢 Congratulations to Qiang Guo on their study "Optimized tissue sample preparation for cryo-electron tomography using serial lift-out" published in Biophysics Reports (Online First). 🔗 https://t.co/xSZwo402Ib #CryoET #Tomography #CryoFIB #InsituStructuralBiology

This year’s chemistry laureate Omar Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1965 to parents who were refugees from Palestine. When we spoke to him he shared his story: “I grew up in a very humble home, we were a dozen of us in one room, sharing it with the cattle that we used to

What's the role of stress granules in translation? Here we provide a clue: we characterized the distribution of ribosomal complexes within SGs and reproduced this landscape with a phase-field model, pointing to a new regulatory mechanism.#TEAMTOMO

A few years ago in my chalk talk, I predicted cryo-ET would conquer tissue imaging - even the brain! Thanks to collective efforts across the field, this vision is becoming reality. Here's how we're making it happen and where we go next! # TEAMTOMO

The work was done together with Prof. Xueliang Zhu and Prof. Miao Gui. Like always, we prepared a Cover proposal, however @NatureComms does not have a cover 😅

I recently realized I overlooked Hugo and Ben’s TEC work back in Martinsried—better late than never! Now I know we’re not alone in studying the 27-rod structure or the apical ring. Also the amazing progress from Paul and Virginie's group

It reminded me of our Toxoplasma work, where the "unrelated" NPC structure later proved useful for Villa Group’s NPC basket story.

I admit the manuscript wasn’t perfectly organized. The reviewers kindly suggested trimming some observations to streamline the narrative. This is our first work in this field, and we found so many details fascinating—we wanted to include everything in case it inspired others.

Given the structural similarities and preparation hurdles, we shifted to multicilia system. As expected, the assembly weren’t perfectly synchronized, but this unpredictability turned out to be a blessing, allowing us to capture the entire process. That’s how the story unfolded.

Despite the low resolution, we observed an intriguing 27-rod structure. Now, we have more details and are surprised to find that it’s critical for centriole/basal body assembly at middle and late stages.

But once we decided to dive in, things took an exciting turn. Targeting a single centriole in cells proved extremely challenging, so our first attempts turned into methods development for cryo-CLIEM. https://t.co/aFz59a2Zx5

Few people knew I was working on this topic. Centrioles were actually the very first project I wanted to pursue at PKU—partly because of the tradition of cell cycle research here. Before making it a main focus, we occasionally captured centrioles in our work, even in Toxoplasma.

Our Basal Body Story is Now Online! It’s been a long journey. Initially, we plan to understand how the basal body assembles, but along the way, we stumbled upon an unexpected opportunity to explore biogenesis as well. https://t.co/BYYyZ9rEVl

Had a really nice week at Hongkong. And three graduate school classmates reunion at a conference!