Dominika Borek

High-frequency biparental inheritance of plant mitochondria upon chilling stress and loss of a genome-degrading nuclease - Nature Plants Maternal inheritance of mitochondria breaks down in the cold when a mitochondrial DNA degrading nuclease is defective, resulting in biparental inheritance that can rescue mitochondrial mutations and g...

Mitochondria can indeed be inherited from the father! 🍀
In this new study, we uncovered the molecular mechanisms underlying mitochondrial inheritance in Nicotiana tabacum. @natplants.nature.com

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

We talk a lot about mitochondrial stress, but how about how do they keep themselves balanced? Good thing our speaker
@nieminm.bsky.social knows everything about that, and will tell all on the next MITOtalk. Usual time and place. See you there?

Excited to share our preprint exploring the structural, biochemical and in vivo properties of DRT7/UG10 reverse transcriptases which produce dsDNA using their primase and polymerase activities and provide broad-spectrum antiphage defense! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#StreetArt by Explicit Citizens.
Lisbon, Portugal, 2024. #Caturday

This is a fantastic example of how to begin as a newcomer to #cryoEM. Being proactive in getting advice from experienced scientists and going to any of the great workshops would likely lower the incidences of erroneous structures in the EMDB and PDB (There’s not a lot but there are a few).

Happy birthday to Charles Darwin,
patron saint of tired scientists, grumpy fieldworkers, and hating your own manuscript.

Some cool E3 ligase structures here with calmodulin-mediated oligomerisation. Also interesting collection/processing to deal with preferred orientation.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

📣 The 2026 Midwest DNA Repair Symposium is coming to Kansas City (registration is open)

🗓 May 30–31, 2026

✨ Talks will be selected from abstracts, with a strong focus on trainees and new investigators.

Please RT & share with your labs!
🔗 sites.google.com/view/kumc-mi...

IUCr2026

Co-chairing IUCr 2026 MS-012 “Next-generation validation metrics for macromolecular structures” with Deborah Harrus (@deborah83.bsky.social)! Focus: new validation concepts/methods/best practices across all methods. Submit abstracts by Feb 15; early-bird reg by Mar 31. www.iucr2026.org

Four representative slices of cryo-tomograms showing annotated organelles.

New on the CryoET Data Portal: ~27,000 tomograms of affinity-captured lysosomes from HEK293T cells across 4 physiological states. Includes raw data, AreTomo3 reconstructions & Membrain-Seg annotations. Openly available for reuse!

cryoetdataportal.czscience.com/depositions/...

We have two funded postdoctoral positions available. Topics encompass:

-Next gen light-sheet fluorescence microscopy instrumentation

-Structured illumination microscopy and other approaches to extend the resolution limit.

-Nonlinear microscopy combined with adaptive optics / phase conjugation

Effects of ribonucleotides on telomeric G4 formation, dynamics, and initiation of ribonucleotide excision repair by RNase H2 Abstract. Human telomeres are composed of TTAGGG repeats that can fold into G-quadruplexes (G4s). G4s can form several different conformations, including p

🎉Kicking off 2026 with our first paper from the Freudenthal lab in NAR. Ribonucleotides reshape telomeric G4s and are resistant to RNase H2 repair. Congrats to the authors and huge thanks to our collaborator Hui-Ting Lee! academic.oup.com/nar/article/...

#teamtomo gets another quantitative cell biology tool!

We extend our Surface Morphometrics pipeline to measure membrane thickness.

Alongside many biological findings, we show that our 3D measurements closely match in vitro vesicle measurements from 2D EM (collab w/Neal Waxham and Fred Heberle).

Crystal structure of di­acet­y­lene unveiled by X-ray and neutron diffraction, Raman spectroscopy and periodic DFT The crystal structure and thermal expansion behaviour of di­acet­y­lene were determined via diffraction methods and supplemented by spectroscopic techniques. The similarities to the structure of acetylene and implications for Titan in situ exploration are discussed.

Larissa Lopes Cavalcante et al.: Crystal structure of di­acet­y­lene unveiled by X-ray and neutron diffraction, Raman spectroscopy and periodic DFT #IntermolecularInteractions #MolecularCrystals ... #IUCr https://journals.iucr.org/paper?S2052252525010486

The atomic ensemble time scale at the NIST Boulder campus has failed.

Evaluating the effects of archaic protein-altering variants in living human adults Promise and pitfalls of using large biobanks to study impacts of archaic protein-coding variants in living humans.

While stories of singular DNA changes that drove evolution of human brain/behaviour remain seductive, advances across multiple fields of biology cast doubt on such simplistic narratives of our origins. A new paper from my lab shows how biobanks may speak to this fundamental question.🧪
Explainer🧵👇1/n