Erik Poppleton's Avatar

Erik Poppleton

@floppleton

Postdoc working on RNA Nanotech & MD simulations @uniheidelberg.bsky.social & MPIP. GROMACS wrangler, oxDNA developer, @molpigs.bsky.social podcast host, and all around weird lil guy. Has been known to post about music and neat bugs found in the woods.

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Latest posts by Erik Poppleton @floppleton

This album somehow evokes every emotion at the same time, one of my all time favorites.

25.02.2026 14:27 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

🀩🀩🀩 such a cool visualization of wobble base pairing 🧬πŸ§ͺ

25.02.2026 13:17 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Exactly. Might be too messy to show the whole anticodon, but the goal would be to show the different binding partners.

19.02.2026 16:57 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Inosine! The art could reflect its multiple binding partners in the tRNA anticodon loop.

19.02.2026 15:44 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life. RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but their large size and structural ...

Ooooh. Cool new paper on origins of life. A simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

13.02.2026 02:18 πŸ‘ 140 πŸ” 58 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 7

Also that a lot of people who would otherwise have gone to the US are staying/applying to Europe, increasing, especially, the top of the pool?

11.02.2026 11:16 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Don’t live in the US anymore, but I’m from Utah, where the state bird is the California Seagull, which I never really saw in my neighborhood. You did, however, see them fighting children for their fries at the swimming pool.

10.02.2026 21:56 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The media had the same problems understanding Kendrick Lamar’s performance last year. It was a similar experience of logging into Bluesky and finding thread after thread of people celebrating nuances, references, and subtext in what many media outlets were calling β€˜aploticial’

10.02.2026 12:34 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The question everybody is asking: does this method suggest Porifera or Ctenophora as the first branch in the animals?

08.02.2026 08:39 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Dynamic Binder Exchange Improves Protein Labeling Efficiency in DNA‐PAINT up to 15‐Fold Dynamic Binder Exchange (DyBE) leverages transient binder–target interactions to enhance labeling efficiency by up to 15-fold in super-resolution microscopy. DyBE maps nanoscale receptor tyrosine kin...

Up to 15-fold improvement in protein labeling for DNA-PAINT πŸ§¬πŸ”¬. We are excited to present our latest work published in @angewandtechemie.bsky.social!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

07.02.2026 08:52 πŸ‘ 15 πŸ” 6 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1
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πŸ§ͺ🧬 You can now play Minecraft with DNA nanotechnology! In our latest preprint we introduce DNA polycubes platform: A modeling driven system, where we use SAT-solvers+multiscale simulations to design 3D finite-size structures that assemble in high yield
chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10....

08.02.2026 03:02 πŸ‘ 33 πŸ” 9 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

The results are so cool! Congrats to everybody involved!

08.02.2026 08:30 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Uhhhh, don’t turn left?

07.02.2026 22:22 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

I moved to Boston and was shocked to discover that left turns are mostly taken by whipping in front of traffic the second the light turns green.

But! Biking was quite possible there because nobody is going anywhere fast, so you just looked drivers in the eyes and dared them to pay your tuition.

07.02.2026 17:48 πŸ‘ 11 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1

Challenge: be normal about Alex Hall
Difficulty: ImpossibHOWDOESHEALWAYSLANDSOCLEAN??? SHOW THESE EUROPEANS THAT THE GREATEST SNOW ON EARTH ALSO MEANS THE GREATEST FLIPS ON EARTH

07.02.2026 14:50 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Screenshot of a Science Magazine headline announcing the retraction of β€œIntegrative phylogenetic positions sponges at the root of the animal tree”

Screenshot of a Science Magazine headline announcing the retraction of β€œIntegrative phylogenetic positions sponges at the root of the animal tree”

The plot thickens in the sponges-vs-ctenophores-as-animal-outgroup drama…

06.02.2026 09:37 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

This is an excellent article on the non-linearities in weaning ourselves off fossil fuels! As the number of extraction/refining/consumption points decrease, the system grows more susceptible to individual failures, which will cause problems unless proactively predicted and protected against.

30.01.2026 23:25 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Yeah, I’m gonna need this.

29.01.2026 17:21 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Structures of mRNA come to life thanks to some innovative use of DNA-PAINT 🧬

26.01.2026 21:10 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Full of courage because they’re no longer invertebrates.

24.01.2026 19:43 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage

21.01.2026 19:25 πŸ‘ 1136 πŸ” 414 πŸ’¬ 39 πŸ“Œ 110

Neat paper! Boosting to the MP feed 🧬

22.01.2026 13:20 πŸ‘ 9 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

Megan is, in addition to being a brilliant physicist, one of the most gifted communicators about complex topics in our field. Don’t miss our latest edition of the Molpigs podcast!
🧬

19.01.2026 17:33 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Megan is, in addition to being a brilliant physicist, one of the most gifted communicators about complex topics in our field. Don’t miss our latest edition of the Molpigs podcast!
🧬

19.01.2026 17:33 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

An interesting discussion on English time-words in the 1600s that I don’t remember being covered in @englishhistpod.bsky.social

17.01.2026 22:15 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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As an enthusiast of both DNA origami and phage, this work is so exciting to see! Check out this article about "Bacteriophage-Mimetic DNA Origami Needle" from the laboratory of Kurt Gothelf. I love the concept, idea, and execution! πŸ§¬πŸ¦ πŸ’‰

advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

16.01.2026 12:16 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Developments in one of the long-running questions in DNA origami diagnostics/therapeutics: how folded is your structure after exposure to biology 🧬

16.01.2026 12:05 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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I am very excited to share our pre-print that was just released on the bioRxiv entitled "Biomolecular Condensates Dictate the Folding Landscape of Proteins" doi.org/10.64898/202...

Very grateful for @jerelleaj.bsky.social and the members of the Joseph Group for their support on this project! (1/4)

14.01.2026 21:09 πŸ‘ 19 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1
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On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other "Alien" Intelligences) (Apologies for the length of this post, which means it gets cut off in the email version.

My latest on Substack -- a write-up of the talk I gave at NeurIPS in December.

aiguide.substack.com/p/on-evaluat...

14.01.2026 18:43 πŸ‘ 122 πŸ” 36 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 4

Important thread for people who don’t know about/use Bluesky’s powerful feed curation features:

12.01.2026 16:30 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0