John Weir

Congratulations Hassan, very well deserved!

Thanks a lot Ula, it was a really enjoyable visit!

Class 4b from Grundschule am Hechinger Eck visited our lab. 22 kids learned about DNA with @jweir.bsky.social, peered through microscopes to explore their cheek cells, insects & even carpet (!). Best part? DNA extraction from bananas! 🧬🍌 #biology #education #STEM #schoolvisit #DNA #MaxPlanck

Thank you to everyone involved in the project. Emma Kane provided outstanding leadership and supervision in the project, but we would like in particular to thank the @unituebingen.bsky.social students Lena Eckert and Lio Trefs for their amazing work!

We find that the proteins of the Ectocarpus axis have many features shared with other organisms, but in a unique combination. We speculate that the arrangement may allow brown algae to regulate recombination by diverse mechanisms of recruiting more or less ecHOP1 to chromosomes

Thanks to all the people involved in the project, in particular to the outstanding @unituebingen.bsky.social students Lena Eckert and Lio Trefs!

#AlphaFold2 found that ecRED1 had *six* candidate closure motifs. Careful biochemical analysis could only prove the veracity of one of these, but with the door open for the other motifs to be activated by post-translational modifications

We found that ecHOP1 has two splice variants. One, which contains two "closure motifs"- sequences that bind to other ecHOP1 proteins - and one isoform with none

Previous work from @eelcotromer.bsky.social and @bungoakiyoshi.bsky.social had identified potential candidates for two factors that assemble on meiotic chromosomes to form the "axis". We found that both of these proteins, ecHOP1 and ecRED1 are specifically expressed in meiotic tissue

Exploring Meiosis in Brown Algae: Meiotic Axis Proteins in the model brown alga Ectocarpus Most extant eukaryotic systems share core meiosis-specific genes, suggesting meiosis evolved only once in the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). These genes have been characterized as master regu...

New preprint! How does meiosis work in non-model organisms? Together with Susana Coelho at the MPI for Biology Tübingen @mpi-bio-fml.bsky.social , we took a look at the proteins of the meiotic axis in the brown alga Ectocarpus www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is a great opportunity to join two fantastic labs starting in an outstanding research environment. Apply!

Meiosis: Exploring diversity to discover the fundamentals Meiosis is an essential cell division for sexual reproduction and fertility across eukaryotes. It involves a series of tightly regulated processes, including entry into meiosis, pairing of homologs, …

Registration now open for the 2025 EMBO workshop on Meiosis! June 22-26, 2025, Engelberg, Switzerland.
Deadline for abstract submissions and registration is Feb 15th, 2025. Lots of speaker slots will be selected from abstracts, so apply now! meetings.embo.org/event/25-mei...

Kinetic and structure-based comparisons of silent and stimulatory flagellin interactions with TLR5 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.09.627598v1

The molecular machinery of meiotic recombination Meiotic recombination, a cornerstone of eukaryotic diversity and individual genetic identity, is essential for the creation of physical linkages between homologous chromosomes, facilitating their fait...

Roses are 🔴, violets are 🔵, check out our latest mini-review! portlandpress.com/biochemsoctr...