Luke Lavis

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.

Thanks, as always, to @rhodamine110.bsky.social for hooking us up with buckets of JaneliaFluor-HaloTag ligand dyes.

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...

How genetically encoded sensors have lit up neuroscience Tools that track specific molecules in neurons have enabled researchers to probe previously unexplored aspects of neurobiology — although important caveats remain.

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...

Chemical biology 2026

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.

You made that silly esterase thing actually useful--that is something:)

Single-cell synaptome mapping of endogenous protein subpopulations in mammalian brain - Nature Communications Synapses are diverse within a single neuron. Here, the authors present a method for single-cell synaptome imaging of endogenous protein subpopulations in the mouse brain, enabling spatial mapping of s...

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...

Chemical Tools for Complex Biological Systems IV Organizers Luke Lavis, HHMI/Janelia Research Campus Matthew Bogyo, Stanford University Zev Gartner, University of California, San Francisco Jennifer Prescher, University of California, Irvine

ahem, ONE of THE chemical biology conferences of 2026:) www.janelia.org/you-janelia/...

Found it!

Secretome translation shaped by lysosomes and lunapark-marked ER junctions - Nature Live-cell imaging of mRNA encoding secretome proteins and translated nascent peptide markers show that secretome translation occurs at endoplasmic reticulum junctions near lysosomes, requires lun...

A fantastic paper by my @hhmijanelia.bsky.social colleague and friend Heejun Choi (who is on the job market!). Another elegant use of the Janelia Fluor dyes for cellular imaging. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exploring the Spatial Limits of Extracellular Vesicles‐Mediated Intercellular Communication Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are biological nanovectors that retain molecular signatures of their cells of origin and mediate intercellular communication, resulting in ideal platforms for the develop....

Check out this cool method to quantify EV diffusion in vivo using the JF dyes! Awesome work by Ema Cocucci and coworkers. urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

Outlook is autocorrecting "on:off ratio" to "on😯ff ratio" and I love it so much.

Very cool collaborative work between multiple groups across three institutions. Shoutout to @rhodamine110.bsky.social and his crew along with longtime @the.3i.social community @so-lets-kilab70.bsky.social for deploying 3i's #latticelightsheet for some particularly elegant chromatin microscopy. 🔥🔬🧠🧬🥽

Just upgraded to a Claude Enterprise account (thanks HHMI) and was playing with the Molecule studio artifact. Here is rhodamine 110, my BlueSky username. Looks like our jobs are safe for now!

A new, nerdy paper. We figured out (some) of the rules underlying cell-permeability of probes and designed ligands that light up, grab, and move proteins around. Awesome @hhmijanelia.bsky.social x @uwmadison.bsky.social x @stjuderesearch.bsky.social collaboration! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

📢 Applications are open for the 4th installment of our ChemTools conference.

We'll explore:
🧪 Platforms & tools for analyzing cell/tissue networks
⚡ Methods to perturb biological networks
🔍 Applications that yield new insights

🛏️ Lodging + meals covered
➡️ Apply by Dec 5: https://janelia.news/CHM26

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PSA: If you are a #ChemDraw user on the Mac, they changed the font for the ACS Document 1996 style in the recent past; Helvetica to Arial. Watch out for vestigial Helvetica characters in figures, which some journal submission platforms *really* don't like.

My debut on BlueSky! Here’s how we harvest the firing of neurons to see them better in the living brain! 👇

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Grateful for the amazing dyes from @rhodamine110.bsky.social and insightful suggestions from @adamezracohen.bsky.social !

The sophomore outing for this revelatory conference is here! Join us for #OPTSRC for the latest in optical probes, which are crucial for biological imaging techniques. You'll meet organizers like @rhodamine110.bsky.social and more. View the agenda and save your space: buff.ly/LIRRF15

Research Technician - Open Chemistry Primary Work Address: 19700 Helix Drive, Ashburn, VA, 20147 Current HHMI Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account. Summary: Open Chemistry is a collaborative research group whose missio...

We're looking for 1-2 enthusiastic early career chemists to join our Open Chemistry team at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social. Come help us create amazing dyes and share them with the world. Please share with the best recent/soon-to-be B.S. chemists you know! bit.ly/42w8C6N

Just to be clear—I was a lowly tech at Probes making large amounts the dyes that others had dreamt up. But I loved the chemistry and the colors—it inspired me to dream up my own fluorophores.

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Thanks Luke! Grateful for your good work kind sir. Thirty years ago, I remember crowding around the lightbox in awe with my Pharmingen R&D colleagues at the glowing BioColors vectors we had grown up after licensing from Roger Tsien's Lab down the street at UCSD where I was about to graduate. 🔬🧪🥽🔥🌈

I’ve been a dye chemist for a quarter century! 25 years ago today I walked into this funky little company in Eugene, OR called Molecular Probes. My first task was making Alexa Fluor 633 and I never looked back. I am grateful for all my teachers and mentors along the way.

DELTA: a method for brain-wide measurement of synaptic protein turnover reveals localized plasticity during learning - Nature Neuroscience Researchers developed DELTA, a method for brain-wide measurement of synaptic protein turnover with single-synapse resolution, providing a powerful tool to localize and study mechanisms underlying syna...

Honored to help enable two back-to-back papers in @natureneuro.bsky.social; first DELTA www.nature.com/articles/s41... with collaborators at @hhmijanelia.bsky.social and then EPSILON www.nature.com/articles/s41... with @adamezracohen.bsky.social; @dyerfulchymist.bsky.social is always in the mix!

🥼 Janelia researchers led by @boazmohar.bsky.social @nspruston.bsky.social @rhodamine110.bsky.social & @svoboda314.bsky.social @alleninstitute.bsky.social have developed a new imaging tool that maps brain-wide changes in neuronal connections. 🧠

🔗 www.janelia.org/news/new-ima...

A little nugget of whimsy: Apple Music has these “lyrics” for the Star Wars main theme (from ESB).

You know you're getting old when your Organic Chemistry Lab TA training partner from the first week of grad school is now an editor at @acs.org (does this mean I have to click 'Accept' @pomerantz.bsky.social?)

How it started: About eight years ago Bob Tjian ("Tij") and I sat in the back of cab in San Francisco and discussed the crazy idea of using live-cell single-molecule tracking for high-throughput drug screening.

How it's going:

What would be a good aliquot size?