Andrew Blackford

Happy to share our new review on 3D chromatin organisation by cohesin with you. It was a great pleasure to review recent advances and future prospects with @danielgerlich.bsky.social.

Postdocs at Center for Gene Expression in Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine

We are looking for a Postdoc to join us at the Center for Gene Expression @cgen2025.bsky.social at the University of Copenhagen! Full advertisement here: employment.ku.dk/faculty/?sho...

Congratulations, looks like a great resource!

Registration is open!🧬

Join us at Egmond aan Zee (April 19–24, 2026) for the next DNA Repair Meeting. We have an amazing line-up of speakers.

📅 Deadline for early registration: Jan 10, 2026
🔗 dnarepairmeeting-egmond2026.com

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...

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

Very nice work, congratulations Arnab & team!

Systems-level feedback loops maintain gene expression homeostasis following RNA polymerase II dosage perturbation Transcription is regulated by sequence-specific transcription factors and enzymes allowing access to genes in chromatin. However, recent data indicate that the abundance of RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) ...

Extremely proud to share the impressive work done by Anouk Olthof et al. on how cells maintain healthy levels of RNAPII, and how they respond when levels are too low. Fascinating stuff, we think www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Mitotic single-stranded DNA suppression by DDIAS Incomplete DNA replication and chromosome breakage during mitosis pose major threats to chromosome segregation. The CIP2A-TOPBP1 complex acts to mitigate this peril, but its exact role is not yet unde...

New work from the lab! 🔬

We report that DDIAS is a new component of the mitotic CIP2A-TOPBP1 pathway of genome maintenance. 1/n

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Mitotic single-stranded DNA suppression by DDIAS Incomplete DNA replication and chromosome breakage during mitosis pose major threats to chromosome segregation. The CIP2A-TOPBP1 complex acts to mitigate this peril, but its exact role is not yet unde...

See also the elegant and complementary study from the @durocher1.bsky.social lab, also out on bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Finally, we are particularly grateful to the patients and their families for their participation in this study.

The work was led by our star postdoc Kaima Tsukada & is the result of a great collaboration with labs of @fenaochs.bsky.social, @profstewartlab.bsky.social, @tcr-miller.bsky.social, @antonywoliver.bsky.social, Zafar Iqbal & others not on Bluesky.

We have also identified patients with bi-allelic mutations in DDIAS and CIP2A, who present with severe neurological phenotypes, revealing the pathological consequences of the failure to resolve DNA lesions during mitosis.

In brief: DDIAS is a mitosis-specific TOPBP1-binding protein that acts downstream of TOPBP1-CIP2A. DDIAS also has a ssDNA-binding domain, & mutation of this domain or loss of TOPBP1 binding leads to chromosomal breaks & micronuclei, as well as synthetic lethality in cells deficient in BRCA1 or BRCA2

DDIAS is a single-stranded DNA-binding effector of the TOPBP1-CIP2A complex in mitosis DNA double-strand breaks and unresolved DNA replication intermediates are particularly dangerous during mitosis. Paradoxically, cells inactivate canonical DNA repair mechanisms during chromosome segre...

Excited to share our lab’s latest preprint! We identify DDIAS as a novel single-stranded DNA-binding component of the TOPBP1–CIP2A complex, which acts in a mitotic DNA damage response pathway to protect chromosome integrity. Short summary below, and read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congrats Beth, fantastic work!

Thrilled that our paper is in print @science.org!!
*Platelets sequester cell free DNA, including free fetal and tumour-derived DNA*
Tweetorial from @l-cmurphy.bsky.social below. Check out the news feature science.org/content/arti... and terrific editorial from Dennis Lo #platelets_in_the_limelight

One week left to apply for the postdoc position in my lab at Oxford @ox.ac.uk

Join our exciting cancer immunology research at @oncology.ox.ac.uk, @oxfordcancer.bsky.social & @oxcio.bsky.social.

Deadline: 11 August 2025 (noon).

Congratulations!

Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Blackford Group A position as Postdoctoral Research Associate is available at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, in the group headed by Dr. Andrew Blackford. Th

We’re #hiring, please share! A fully funded #postdoc position is available in my lab to work on DNA damage response mechanisms.

Please get in touch with your CV if you are interested; closing date: 27th June 2025.

More details here: candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Blackford Group A position as Postdoctoral Research Associate is available at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, in the group headed by Dr. Andrew Blackford. Th

We’re #hiring, please share! A fully funded #postdoc position is available in my lab to work on DNA damage response mechanisms.

Please get in touch with your CV if you are interested; closing date: 27th June 2025.

More details here: candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

I am overjoyed to share that I have been selected as a Lundbeck Fellow 2025. Thank you to @lundbeckfonden.bsky.social for their trust in me - My lab and I cannot wait to get started on this important work.

this week 20 years ago, Nature published two seminal papers showing for the first time that BRCA-mutant cells were selectively sensitive to PARP inhibitors, paving the way for clinical trials and approval of PARP inhibitors for patients with BRCA-mutant ovarian and breast cancers, and beyond.

A must for all DNA repair aficionados!

Egmond DNA Repair Meeting → April 19–24, 2026 🇳🇱
✔️ Confirmed top speakers
✔️ Ample opportunities for talks & posters

Don’t miss it: dnarepairmeeting-egmond2026.com

Congratulations Ernst, great to see your work in print. Predictomes is a fantastic resource for the field!

Predictomes, a classifier-curated database of AlphaFold-modeled protein-protein interactions Schmid and Walter train a classifier that discerns functionally relevant structure predictions in proteome-wide protein-protein interaction (PPI) screens using AlphaFold-Multimer, and they use this co...

Very excited to share that my thesis work is out in Molecular Cell! We trained a Structure and Omics informed Classifier (SPOC) to score binary AlphaFold multimer (AF-M) predictions by structural quality and consistency with experimental omics datasets. www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Postdoctoral Fellow – DNA Damage Response Inhibitor Sensitisation in Cancer Postdoctoral Fellow – DNA Damage Response Inhibitor Sensitisation in Cancer The Discovery Centre, Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK Competitive salary and benefits Introduction to role: Do you have expe...

Postdoctoral Fellow position available in the DDR Biology and Functional Genomics teams at AstraZeneca in Cambridge UK. Closing date: 30-Jan-2025 astrazeneca.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/Emerging-Tal...

Excited to see the final published form of this amazing @drewberry.bsky.social‬ animation of DNA repair go live! Watch your favourite friends BRCA1/2, RPA, RAD51, Exo1, BLM, PCNA, MRN, primase and DNA polymerase perform their recombination magic. Cool educational & scientific tool for our community.

Congratulations Drew, beautiful animation!

Transcription-coupled repair of DNA–protein crosslinks DNA–protein crosslinks (DPCs) are highly toxic DNA lesions that are relevant to multiple human diseases. They are caused by various endogenous and environmental agents, and from the actions of enzymes...

Happy to share a review written with the wonderful @jstingele.bsky.social on transcription-coupled DPC repair, featuring an overview of new methods, close comparison with TC-NER, comments on clinical implications and plenty of discussion of the unknowns.

www.cell.com/trends/cell-...

RAD51 recruitment but not replication fork stability associates with PARP inhibitor response in ovarian cancer patient-derived xenograft models Abstract. Poly(ADP‐ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors (PARPis) are currently used to treat BRCA1/2 mutant cancers. Although PARPi sensitivity has been at

Happy to share our study by Francien Talens and many colleagues on RAD51 foci formation as a functional marker for PARPi sensitivity in ovarian cancer PDX models. academic.oup.com/narcancer/ar...