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The Tortured Proteins Department
Stephanie Wankowicz
8 episodes
5 hours ago
A deep dive into scientific discovery and the process of doing science, hosted by Stephanie Wankowicz and James Fraser.
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Life Sciences
Science
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All content for The Tortured Proteins Department is the property of Stephanie Wankowicz and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
A deep dive into scientific discovery and the process of doing science, hosted by Stephanie Wankowicz and James Fraser.
Show more...
Life Sciences
Science
Episodes (8/8)
The Tortured Proteins Department
Episode 8: Open Science in a Changing Academic World

Topics:

  • Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education
  • Government Shutdown
  • HHMI's new open science policies
  • Shrinking PhD pools
  • The Nobel Prizes
  • The Bear
  • TLOS Reactions


Preprint: Experiment-guided AlphaFold3 resolves accurate protein ensembles



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2 weeks ago
1 hour 1 minute 24 seconds

The Tortured Proteins Department
Episode 7: Preprint notifications and the point of rotations

Latest News:

-H1B changes & chaos

-Who determines what gets into Pubmed (Literature Selection Technical Review Committee)


Preprints:

Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models


Improved cryo-EM reconstruction of sub-50 kDa complexes using 2D template matching

High-resolution ab initio reconstruction enables cryo-EM structure determination of small particles (See great biorxiv comment on the paper!)





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1 month ago
49 minutes 26 seconds

The Tortured Proteins Department
Episode 6: Open Science and the Future of Engagement

We chatted about the recent meetings, latest news, open science, social media, and, of course, the recent engagement.


Preprints:

Aromatic Ring Flips Reveal Reshaping of Protein Dynamics in Crystals and Complexes


Computational design of conformation-biasing mutations to alter protein functions

Why do we still publish in scientific journals? - Pedro Beltrao's blog





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2 months ago
53 minutes 54 seconds

The Tortured Proteins Department
Episode 5: NIH Ghosting, Open Access Policies, and Scientists' interaction with LLMs

We chatted about the latest news, including the new NIH open access policy, trends observed with scientists using LLMs, & the Montpelier Mile race.


"The new Administration began weaponizing what should not be weaponized - the health of all Americans...creating chaos and promoting an...unreasoned agenda of blacklisting certain topics, that...has absolutely nothing to do with the promotion of science." - Judge William Young (reported by Max Kozlov, Nature News)



An Evaluation of Biomolecular Energetics Learned by AlphaFold


Product-stabilized filamentation by human glutamine synthetase allosterically tunes metabolic activity



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3 months ago
53 minutes 3 seconds

The Tortured Proteins Department
Episode 4: Conformational Ensembles & Teaching Vibe Coding

- News round-up

- Conformational Ensembles Conference

- Preprints discussed:

Multiscale guidance of AlphaFold3 with heterogeneous cryo-EM data (https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.04490)

Boltz-2 Towards Accurate and EfficientBinding Affinity Prediction (https://jeremywohlwend.com/assets/boltz2.pdf)

- Guiding vibe coding for science

-Dipsea & Montpelier Mile


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4 months ago
39 minutes 40 seconds

The Tortured Proteins Department
Episode 3: Travels, Protein Folding, Side Chain Dynamics, and Strava Kudos

The preprints discussed in this episode.


Structures of protein folding intermediates on the ribosome:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.07.647236v1.full.pdf
AF2χ: Predicting protein side-chain rotamer distributions with AlphaFold2:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.16.649219v1.full.pdf

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5 months ago
58 minutes 5 seconds

The Tortured Proteins Department
Episode 2: Cool Science Among Continued Uncertainty

We chatted about the continued chaos of science infrastructure and dived into some cool science from recent meetings Jaime and Stephanie attended. We introduce two new segments: preprints and how to do science.


The pre-prints discussed in this episode:

Counting particles could give wrong probabilities in Cryo-Electron Microscopy- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.27.644168v1


Enthalpy-entropy trade-offs in the evolution of ligand specificity in a superfamily of transcription factors- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.23.644840v1?rss=1

Conserved energetic changes drive function in an ancient protein fold- https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.02.646877v1


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6 months ago
47 minutes 15 seconds

The Tortured Proteins Department
Scientific Uncertainty and Graduate Education

Episode 1. We discuss the declining support of science in the US and how it may impact the future of graduate science education. Recorded- 3/14/2025

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7 months ago
43 minutes 40 seconds

The Tortured Proteins Department
A deep dive into scientific discovery and the process of doing science, hosted by Stephanie Wankowicz and James Fraser.