Biologist at The Sainsbury Lab; passionate about plant pathogens and evolution; open science advocate; loves travel, food and sports; nomad and hunter-gatherer.

Norwich, UK
Joined June 2009
I just published: What scientists miss when they don’t read patents Why my lab reads patents to understand plant immunity, and the wiki we built so you can too. kamounlab.medium.com/what-sc…
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State of the nation 🇺🇸
Trump: I called Google Maps to change the name of the Atlantic Ocean to Trump Ocean. Sundar said, “No, no, no. This time I'm not doing it.” He said, “Oceans are different, sir. They cover a lot of countries. Please don't ask us to do that.”
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Sophien Kamoun retweeted
BUG with FIREWORKS in the back! How cool is nature! 🎆
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Applies to older Professors too 😝 Profarell (noun; plural profarells): a senior professor who watches others doing lab work, hands clasped behind their back, offering occasional unsolicited advice.
In Italy, one of the hobbies for older men is “Umarell”. Retired men who enjoy watching construction sites while giving unsolicited advice
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Oh man, love this! I’m gonna use it, dude 👇🏼
AI is a mirror. lazy people get lazy results. curious people get superpowers.
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Today I am sharing a new preprint and accompanying blog post. Hundreds of published papers include impossible western blots showing protein expression in cell lines that have deleted or mutated genes. These clumsy mistakes are widespread and repeated by LLMs.
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I wish they would, but they won’t unless they change the incentives and move beyond the toxic obsession with CNS papers towards discoveries with real, transformative impact. China has been investing massively in biology for over 20 years. Yet breakthroughs that make you stop, rethink everything, and fundamentally change how you work in the lab—like CRISPR and AlphaFold—have been remarkably few.
China is seeding their Nobel prize winners in 20-25 years...do numbers right and check how long and how much investiment had the actual Nobel awardees in experimental sciences such as chemistry, physics or medicine. Long term funding, superb resources and patience.
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🤖 Made with AI
How To: Genetically Modify a Flower 🧬🌹
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Plant immunity is far more diverse than previously appreciated. Grasses, in particular, have evolved a remarkable array of novel immune mechanisms 🌾 🌱
Jijie Chai reporting the Cryo-EM structure of the atypical rice resistance Protein Ptr! Forms a Pentameric ER localized Ca2+ Channel. Farnesylated Ptr C-term negatively regulates the channel, and fungal effector AvrPita directly activates the channel by cleaving it off 🤯
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Sophien Kamoun retweeted
Don't pay ridiculous "gold open access fees" to journals. Release a preprint + publish the paper as "closed access" + upload the final PDF to PMC without bothering about embargo.
If your Author Accepted Manuscript was supported by @NIH funding, it must be posted publicly to PMC without an embargo. There's no cost and it does not require buying expensive open access plans. Take steps to upload your Author Accepted Manuscript here: nihms.nih.gov/login/?next=/s…
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Sophien Kamoun retweeted
Replying to @ClemMarchal
@ClemMarchal presenting the gamechanging Pikobody tech at #ICBPI2026 in Nanjing! It's so cool to see how much this technology has developed in the last few years 🤯 science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
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Sophien Kamoun retweeted
Interesting pikobodies talk from @ClemMarchal at #ICBPI2026
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Sophien Kamoun retweeted
Interesting talk on single cell analysis in plant-microbe interations from @nobolly at #ICBPI2026
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Sophien Kamoun retweeted
Jijie Chai reporting the Cryo-EM structure of the atypical rice resistance Protein Ptr! Forms a Pentameric ER localized Ca2+ Channel. Farnesylated Ptr C-term negatively regulates the channel, and fungal effector AvrPita directly activates the channel by cleaving it off 🤯
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Sophien Kamoun retweeted
Where do you go next after reporting from the Strait of Hormuz? For the past three months, Citrini Research, an independent research firm, has been working with our team and an internal research model to see if they could use AI to create a new drug. What follows is an entertaining, candid, and humbling account of a group of motivated nonexperts (or “filthy casuals”, as Citrini would say) trying to tackle a real problem in human health with Claude. We landed on scorpion neurotoxins, which kill over 3,000 people a year. Of the 211 designs we produced and tested, 17 met our criteria for a binder. None of the designs bound more than one toxin and none have been tested for neutralizing a toxin. One of my favorite quotes from the piece is: “Our virtual biologist may have compressed a year's worth of work into a couple days, but biology works at the speed of life…Over two days, we watched Claude work through problems at a speed that was difficult to comprehend. For the next two months, we spent much of the time becoming familiar with laboratory turnaround times (This mostly involved sending memes in Slack).”
What is AI really capable of in bio? To separate hype from reality, we spent 3 months working firsthand with @AnthropicAI's internal research model to see if it could create an experimental scorpion antivenom. Introducing Citrini Therapeutics. citriniresearch.com/p/citrin…
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#NatureRipoffs @nature after hearing the news that China is funding young researchers for 15 years… #moneyfornothing
China has selected its first group of young researchers to receive funding for up to 15 years, in one of the longest research grants on offer to scientists globally go.nature.com/4z4Q3pw
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