@MichaelLinLab
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Stanford Neurobiology and Bioengineering Precision molecular design / synbiochem. Also @michaelzlin
Greenberg → Tsien →
Joined July 2022
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Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Public preview of BioEmu2! @MSFTResearch AI for Science’s new foundation model for biomolecular structure, dynamics and function. Open weights, MIT license.
github.com/microsoft/bioemu2
Movie: BioEmu2-simulated binding of intrinsically disordered peptide PUMA to MCL-1 receptor. 🧵⬇️
The study suggests young researchers make more disruptive discoveries, and older ones fewer but more lasting ones.
Perhaps experience, time, and awareness of long-term bottlenecks might be advantages for older researchers to make the more difficult and lasting breakthroughs.
Experienced scientists produce ‘disruptive’ work less often than early-career researchers, but when they do, their innovations are more likely to have a lasting effect
go.nature.com/4sb85DD
Another possibility: postdocs and young PIs develop and train on the latest methods (RNAi, CRISPR, now AI), and these provide finding that can overturn earlier conclusions, so we get large bursts of disruptive work by younger researchers, but these aren't grand paradigm shifts
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
I’m so sick of reviewers using ChatGPT to review papers. It’s atrocious having to respond to the same garbage from all 3 reviewers where each comment requests 5 new analyses. Just don’t agree to review papers if it’s too much work 🤷♂️
Even if you used AI to review my paper- at least ensure the asks are genuine and then choose the most pertinent/relevant comments to include in your review? Is that too much work?
I’m sure journal editors recognize that this is a real problem but can’t do much to rectify this issue.
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Interesting. If I understood this correctly, TIME once again turns out to be the critical measurement axis that unlocks this mystery.
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Want to get clean calcium signals from tons of deep-brain neurons in freely moving animals?
Check our paper science.org/doi/10.1126/scia… !
We show how correcting GRIN lens aberrations transforms MINI2P performance, revealing sparse HD coding in sensory thalamus!
@ScienceAdvances
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Autism cannot be reduced to a simple excitation/inhibition imbalance. Inhibition is not one dial: PV, SST and VIP interneurons regulate different compartments, timescales and network states. A circuit can appear globally “balanced” yet remain computationally disorganized.
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
In 1952, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley developed a mathematical model describing how neurons generate electrical impulses.
Using the giant axon of a squid, they studied how sodium (Na⁺) and potassium (K⁺) currents influence the electrical activity of nerve cells.
As luck would have it, my PhD advisor Mike Greenberg happened to be in Barcelona at the same time as me.
Like a science-y version of a Whit Stillman movie, we chatted about engrams and enhancers while dining over tapas and strolling through the city.
Was fun celebrating the recent Nobel with many of the pioneers in optogenetics at Optogen 2026 in beautiful Barcelona — a great place to reunite with old friends.
The conference brought together wide range of approaches, from optical methods to new indicators to clinical trials
I presented ASAP voltage indicators, bioluminescent neurotransmitter reporters, and psCas12f photoswitchable gene editors... not optogenetics as defined by the Nobel committee, but still involving photons and genetic tools.
Many thanks to @IBECBarcelona for the invitation!
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Institute Director Kang Shen shares congratulations to Karl Deisseroth for his recent Nobel Prize. Karl shares that he started out with an interest in developmental neuroscience and is excited to see the frontiers of the field today.
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Our new paper in @NatureNeuro!
Psilocybin remodels synapses differently in healthy and stressed brains, promoting new connections and limiting stress-induced loss.
We also identify distinct mechanisms for plasticity and hallucination-like behavior. #Zuolab
rdcu.be/LwdavdKQQJwa
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Our paper is out in Nature, congrats to Qiyu, An et al!
By stimulating ~20 motor cortex neurons carefully selected based on their activity, we could induce learned population activity and, sometimes, the movement itself, depending on the brain's state.
nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
Here's a cool new drug that just dosed its first patient in China.
It targets the cancer antigen, B7-H3, and 'desialylates' - removes surface sialic acids that suppress immune responses. In experiments, this activates tumor killing, mainly by NK cells and macrophages.
The trial is in China, run by Shanghai Henlius - the tech itself originated from the US biotech, Palleon Pharma.
This desialylation mechanism is independent of PD1: in other words, a potentially new cancer immunotherapy.
By my count, China has cleared 160 novel drugs for first-in-human clinical trials this year — so far.
One of them is a potential treatment for sepsis, a condition associated with ~20% of all deaths globally.
The drug, made by Pyrotech Therapeutics, is the first to enter the clinic that blocks formation of the gasdermin D pore (that triggers pyroptosis - inflammatory cell death - in sepsis).
That’s just one of many — we looked at all of them here: breakingground.substack.com/…
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
The pope recapitulating one of the tenents of modern neuroscience "Intelligence must draw on memory" 🤯
Intelligence must draw on memory. The mind must not simply compile data — as an algorithm now does more quickly than we can — but recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognize, and connect more deeply with the goodness of these experiences. Everything that is good begins “with the Spirit” and thus possesses a breath, a dynamism and a sense of communion that, once experienced, are engraved upon the heart. vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/e…
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
I am pleased to be recognized by Princeton University for the Woodrow Wilson Award. A big year for @Princeton science/engineering alumnae, with Mary Brunkow getting the corresponding graduate award. I wonder if they feel sorry for us...it's not been fun for basic science these days. @caltech @CaltechCCE
The University will present its top awards for @princetonalumni to @francesarnold '79, 2018 Nobel laureate and engineering professor at @Caltech, and Mary Brunkow *91, 2025 Nobel laureate and distinguished investigator at the @isbsci in Seattle.
Arnold, who graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering, will receive the Woodrow Wilson Award. Brunkow, who earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology, will receive the James Madison Medal. These awards will be presented on Feb. 20, 2027 at Alumni Day: bit.ly/4yO9rXx
ALT The words: "Nobel laureates Frances Arnold '79 and Mary Brunkow *91 to receive Princeton’s top alumni awards" with photos of Frances and Mary
Prof. Michael Lin retweeted
This has been a wonderful collaboration with @GoogleDeepMind to make new-to-nature #enzymes. Great work from the whole team.
Introducing AlphaProtein Novo, a pipeline for de novo enzyme design! In collaboration with @francesarnold's group, we developed AP Novo and used it to get SoTA "novel-scaffold" activity on 2 benchmark reactions and create enzymes to synthesize the pharmaceutical motif piperidine and degrade the environmental toxin DEHP.
Work led by @ZvxyWu @ZiqiLi0513 with teammates @alexechu_ @kelly_ruijie @schulluc @jacobjinkelly @rosaliags @davidla @solserpens @j_reisenbauer, @pengliu_group, Josh, Thomas, Amy, Tristan, Harshnira, and others. It was a joy and privilege to work with you all!
Preprints and code:
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
github.com/google-deepmind/a…