Fitzpatrick Laboratory

the-one-percent.qedscience.com Thanks to #qed for including our preprint entitled "Amyloid-mediated RNA uptake by sperm for embryonic delivery" in the most compelling preprints of 2025! biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

Join speaker Chi-Min Ho @Columbia at #CS3Dbiologicalfunction2026. Chi-Min’s research integrates structural biology approaches to investigate host-pathogen interactions in malaria parasites. Extended abstract deadline: July 27, 2026 hubs.li/Q04p7b7x0

What a beautiful artistic imagining of our structure! I really love your take on our boat theme ❤️⛵ Thank you so much for featuring us @fenguita, we in the @cmholab are huge fans of your work!!

New findings from @cmholab @ColumbiaMed on how malaria parasites invade human cells yield proof of concept for new antimalarial drug phys.org/news/2026-06-m… via @physorg_com

The @cmholab @ColumbiaMed solve decades-old mystery of how malaria parasites invade human cells, via @EurekAlert! eurekalert.org/news-releases/…

Incredibly proud of Messi Haile @mehsehret, a @cmholab founding member, for her beautiful work uncovering the inner workings of a central piece of the malaria parasite invasion machinery: the malarial moving junction, out today in @CellPressNews ! tinyurl.com/4p3md2eb 🦠❄️🔬

@JasonSynaptic @CellCellPress Many congratulations, @JasonSynaptic and team!

Very excited for our new paper, now out in @CellCellPress! /🧵The protein Tau forms intracellular toxic tangles in neurons in Alzheimer’s disease and Tauopathies. Tau pathology slowly spreads from cell-to-cell but the mechanisms of Tau transmission are not clear. /1

@JasonSynaptic Many congratulations @JasonSynaptic! Looking forward to seeing it in print.

@FitzpatrickLab Thanks! That paper is coming out online Monday in Cell. Looking forward to getting the final version out.

the-one-percent.qedscience.com Thanks to #qed for including our preprint entitled "Amyloid-mediated RNA uptake by sperm for embryonic delivery" in the most compelling preprints of 2025! biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

@JasonSynaptic Thanks, @JasonSynaptic, also enjoyed your Arc-Tau story. Vesicles/VLPs/fibrils plus RNA is where it's at!

@FitzpatrickLab Missed this one. Wild biology..super cool!

This is cool. When I was a grad student the lasers I had to align where room-sized. Lasers are so much better each year nature.com/articles/s4158…

Why 50% of human fertilized eggs fail to complete pre-implantation development? Latest work from my lab in @CellCellPress now clarifies the two causes that contribute to the low efficiency of early human embryos and provides one of the solutions. (1/7) doi.org/10.1016/j.cell…

Interactome mapping has been stuck at a few hundred baits over months. HIP-MS changes the regime: ~10,000 pulldowns/week at 500 samples/day, fully automated. A new era for interactomics — and a precursor to high-throughput proteomics writ large. doi.org/10.64898/2026.…

Here's an ESMFold2 demo run by AI agents on Modal for designing potential GLP-1 receptor binders. This test focused on the GLP-1R extracellular domain where semaglutide/Ozempic binds. It measured how well each design recovered the residues that semaglutide contacts. Codex made this neat presentation of the demo with autonomous use of ChimeraX and ElevenLabs.

Characterizing AI-designed proteins requires quantitative biochemistry at massive scale. Enter Amplicon/Protein Bead Display (APB-Display), a fully in vitro platform that quantifies Kd's for >100,000 variants in <3 days (preprint link below!) @Stanford_ChEMH @czbiohub (1/n)

Papers like this are why science remains endlessly exciting. This one made me feel the same wonder I felt at 15 when I first discovered science. || Homing pigeon navigation relies on superparamagnetic macrophages under overcast conditions | Science science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

クライオ電顕データセット解析の自動化 CryoSPARC上での生データの撮影像から高分解能の密度マップ生成までの過程を自動化 対象としたGPCRのデータセットのうち8割で分解能が向上 本論文でのパイプラインはダウンロードして利用可能とのこと #BNTNJC biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

So incredibly excited and grateful to be joining the Burroughs Wellcome Fund PATH family! Thank you @BWFUND and the selection committee members for supporting and believing in our vision, and congrats to the other 2026 PATH Investigators!!! 🥳

The authors show that a rare APOE3 Christchurch (APOE3Ch) variant (which is linked to protection in familial Alzheimer’s disease) reshapes amyloid pathology when expressed only in astrocytes. Instead of reducing plaques overall, it shifts Aβ toward more compact and less toxic forms, lowers oligomeric Aβ, and reduces neuroinflammatory responses. This highlights APOE3Ch as a potential modifier of disease toxicity rather than just amyloid burden. See full study here: #Sec17" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">nature.com/articles/s4139…

A trillionth of a second: How lasers may sharpen next-gen cryo-ET microscopy phys.org/news/2026-02-t… via @physorg_com

New @CellCellPress paper from Bergles lab at Johns Hopkins just built the most comprehensive map of brain myelin ever made — every oligodendrocyte, across the entire mouse brain, across the lifespan. The scale: >10 million cells per brain, terabyte-scale 3D lightsheet volumes, registered to the Allen Brain Atlas across 417 regions from 2 months to 2+ years of age. The technical stack: Custom tissue clearing (CUBIC-L + SHIELD + uRIMS with 40% urea) to preserve endogenous fluorescence. 3D Mask R-CNN for instance segmentation — not just semantic, instance — so it can distinguish individual cells within dense clusters at scale via overlapping sliding windows. Vision Transformer to classify newly-formed vs. mature oligodendrocytes using soma morphology. All cross-referenced against Allen ISH transcriptomics and MICrONS serial EM. What they found: Oligodendrocyte density varies 10,000-fold across brain regions. Left-right hemispheres: r=0.99. Sex: no significant difference. Strain: matters. The brain never stops myelinating. New oligodendrocytes are still being generated in 2-year-old mice. Prefrontal cortex L6 shows the fastest rates of new myelination into old age — the circuits for executive function keep rewiring throughout life. After demyelination, L4 sensory cortex is the most resilient — oligodendrocytes survive at higher rates. The hippocampus loses nearly everything and barely recovers. Degree of injury doesn't predict rate of recovery. These are independent axes. The Alzheimer's result is the most surprising: Dense-core plaques dominate in cortex and hippocampus. Diffuse/small-core plaques dominate in white matter fiber tracts. Old assumption: diffuse plaques are "less toxic." The data says the opposite — small plaques in fiber tracts cause more myelin loss per plaque than dense-core plaques in gray matter. Plaque load and oligodendrocyte loss are essentially uncorrelated (ρ=0.22). The damage is plaque-type and location specific, not load-dependent. For MS and AD research: you can't read off white matter injury from gray matter plaque burden. The pathology in fiber tracts is running on different rules. Data: bossdb.org/project/xu2024 Paper: cell.com/cell/fulltext/…