Vasileios Petrou

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Looking forward to #BPS2026 in San Francisco?

Come by the NIH sponsored Transformative High-Resolution Cryo-Electron Microscopy National Centers for #CryoEM at booth 410.

Our mission is to broaden access to high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy and tomography technologies - cryoemcenters.org

Congratulations to the entire team, including lead author Khuram Ashraf and our excellent collaborators @pstansfeld.bsky.social (and team) and Jason Kaelber.

The original preprint thread with additional information is here: bsky.app/profile/vasi...

Structural basis of undecaprenyl phosphate glycosylation leading to polymyxin resistance in Gram-negative bacteria - Nature Communications The study reveals the structure of ArnC, a membrane glycosyltransferase that modifies undecaprenyl phosphate with aminoarabinose (L-Ara4N), leading to polymyxin resistance. The structure of ArnC in tw...

I'm happy to share that our work describing the #cryoEM #structure of the glycosyltransferase ArnC from Salmonella enterica has been published in Nature Communications. #membrane #protein #PetrouLab

The article is open access and available at:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“NIH will not issue noncompeting continuation awards for existing projects until the SBIR/STTR program is reauthorized. “

**Job Alert** Exciting postdoc position available: theoretical and experimental cryo-EM studies of flexible biomolecules. Competitive salary, collaborative environment at NYSBC and Flatiron Institute. Please share!! and contact: pcossio@flatironinstitute.org

🚨🧠🔬 A major breakthrough in molecular neuroscience:

I am excited to share a new story from our lab, published in accelerated format today by @nature.com:

"Delta-type glutamate receptors are ligand-gated ion channels"

Read more here (free article link): rdcu.be/eGIKz

For non-scientists: the funding rate is somewhere between 7% to ~25% (rare) for NIH or NSF grants, depending on where you are applying. Grants are reviewed by a panel of peers who read the grants, score them, then debate the ratings for 1-2 days to rank them. It is INCREDIBLY competitive already.

Read preprints. Cite preprints. Email people and tell them you loved their preprint. Email people you hated their preprint. Embrace preprints, preprints are good.

That specifically right there is the sound of science in the US dying

Public domain photo of Banff national park in Alberta, Canada.

🚨 Amazing Opportunity 🚨
U Alberta is looking for a director for their new #cryoEM facility
Support excellent researchers (who are really nice people) using state-of-the-art infrastructure.
+ reasonable cost of living
+ near some of most beautiful places in world
+ 🇨🇦
apps.ualberta.ca/careers/post...

Registration is now open for the 4th Structural Biology Symposium.
Poster abstract submission is due on 4/15/2025. isb.med.upenn.edu/4th-structur...
🧬@Structuralbiology

Wondering if your PO, SRO, or other NIH official is still at NIH? Tara pointed out this useful search tool. Unfortunately my MIRA PO, who just took over this portfolio in December, is no longer listed. 💔

openRxiv has arrived!

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of openRxiv as an independent, researcher-led nonprofit to oversee bioRxiv and medRxiv, the world’s leading preprint servers for life and health sciences.
openrxiv.org/introducing-...

#openRxiv #OpenScience #Preprints #bioRxiv #medRxiv

Introducing openRxiv: a new independent home for preprint sharing in the life sciences - openRxiv We’re thrilled to announce the launch of openRxiv as an independent nonprofit to oversee bioRxiv and medRxiv, the world’s leading preprint servers for life and health sciences. openRxiv ensures that r...

🎉 bioRxiv & medRxiv are now managed by openRxiv, a new independent nonprofit. This transition allows for more flexibility and innovation. Our mission remains being a free service to authors ensuring rapid sharing of scientific information before peer review.
ℹ️ openrxiv.org/introducing-...

I keep receiving these emails full of enthusiasm about the 50 alleged NIH study sections that will be (but really are not yet) on the federal register. Folks, council meetings are on an INDEFINITE hold. There is no grant happening. Let's focus on the issue at hand.

Leaders have been saying "let's make every scientists a communicator" for decades. I'd say we have evidence that isn't the answer. It's an example of the scholastic fallacy - which says scientists think everyone thinks about things the same way we do.

There are many reasons for anti-intellectualism, but in the current moment, much of it is political. We’re in a rightwing, segregationist backlash & colleges are viewed as bastions of progressiveness and integration AND sources of an alternative form of authority, making them dangerous to fascists.

Yes indeed.

That’s what seems to be happening, yes.

Most if not all study sections this week didn’t happen. Panels can be found via the following link. Asterisk denotes that the meeting didn’t take place as scheduled.

www.csr.nih.gov/RevPanelsAnd...

Congratulations to all authors for their contributions, and especially to lead author Khuram Ashraf. A big thank you to @pstansfeld.bsky.social and Jason Kaelber for collaborating with us. We acknowledge NIH for funding support, and we also thank NCCAT staff for help with the Krios collection. 9/n

Finally, we propose a catalytic scheme that employs two separate coordination positions for the acceptor phosphate within the catalytic domain, and a reaction mechanism that likely operates in all similar enzymes of the polyprenyl phosphate glycosyltransferase family. 8/n

And, with the help of Mariana Bunoro-Batista and @pstansfeld.bsky.social we perform detailed atomistic simulations with both donor and acceptor substrates to fully describe substrate binding and identify catalytic residues in this enzyme. 7/n

With the help of Bertie Ansell and @pstansfeld.bsky.social, we perform coarse-grained simulations to show that the acceptor lipid UndP threads between the juxtamembrane helices of an ArnC protomer to reach the catalytic GT-A domain. 6/n

WIth the help of Jason Kaelber, we perform a comparison of the two apo ArnC datasets collected on a 200kV Talos Arctica and a 300kV Titan Krios microscope using duplicate grids, to examine whether a higher quality microscope/detector can meaningfully improve the reconstruction for this sample. 5/n

We describe a conformational transition that occurs upon binding of the partial substrate UDP, moving the catalytic GT-A domain closer to the membrane. 4/n

For the UDP-bound state, we observed clear non-protein density within the binding cavity of the catalytic GT-A domain, which we modeled as UDP coordinated by a Mn2+ metal ion. 3/n

We determine the #cryoEM structures of ArnC in lipid nanodiscs: an apo conformation at 2.74Å (Krios dataset) and 2.79Å (Arctica dataset), and a UDP-bound conformation at 2.96Å (Arctica dataset). 2/n