Pedro Beltrao
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pedrobeltrao.bsky.social
Pedro Beltrao
@pedrobeltrao.bsky.social
Associate professor at ETH Zurich, studying the cellular consequences of genetic variation. Affiliated with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and a part of the LOOP Zurich.
Pinned
new preprint: Ubiquitin is a protein modification linked with degradation but known to regulate other functions. Over 100k ubiquitination sites have been discovered and here we (@julianvangerwen.bsky.social + others) try to prioritize those most critical to the cell www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The functional landscape of the human ubiquitinome
Protein ubiquitination regulates cell biology through diverse avenues, from quality control-linked protein degradation to signaling functions such as modulating protein-protein interactions and enzyme...
www.biorxiv.org
It has been disappointing to see the general lack of interest and investment into population genetics and genomic medicine in Switzerland. While we can resort to other national cohorts for research the country can only benefit if the know-how can be applied locally
www.sfa-phrt.ch/success-stor...
Didier Trono Interview “Switzerlands Genetic Diversity is Unique” - PHRT – Personalized Health & Related Technologies
Success Story Didier Trono While other countries are pressing ahead with the Genome of Europe, Switzerland is still hesitating. A huge mistake, says Didier Trono from the Genome Center in Geneva “I do...
www.sfa-phrt.ch
November 11, 2025 at 8:42 AM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
1 week left to apply for a postdoc position in beautiful Switzerland doing awesome mucosal immunology. See below for details! Please re-post to spread the word!
We have an opening for a postdoctoral researcher in my group at the Botnar Institute for Immune Engineering in Basel, Switzerland. The project is aimed at developing novel mucosal adjuvants for application in oral vaccines. Deadline to apply 16.11.25! Please re-post 🔬🧬

join.com/companies/im...
Botnar Institute of Immune Engineering - BIIE (Zürich): Postdoctoral Researcher (100%): Mechanisms of action of mucosal adjuvants
Botnar Institute of Immune Engineering - BIIE has a job opening for Postdoctoral Researcher (100%): Mechanisms of action of mucosal adjuvants in Zürich (published: 30.10.2025). Apply now or check the ...
join.com
November 9, 2025 at 10:41 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Open position at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics:
We are looking for a Director of the Center of Pathogen Bioinformatics
apply.refline.ch/499599/0346/...
I am in the Center's steering board together with fantastic colleagues (Emma Hodcroft @firefoxx66.bsky.social, Richard Neher @neher.io, and
Director, Center for Pathogen Bioinformatics
The Centre for Pathogen Bioinformatics (CPB) is a unit of SIB which offers expertise and services in pathogen bioinformatics, computational molecular epidemiology and related multi-site project manage...
apply.refline.ch
October 25, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
I am honnestly a bit worried by the latest fuss about qed (the IA driven review). While the results are indeed quite impressive (it is very good at listing the claim and finding potential improvement), I don't quite see how this will eventually reduce the reviewing burden or help us
November 7, 2025 at 8:33 AM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Excited to share our latest work on the factors that determine what genes we find (and don't find!) in GWAS and burden tests.

We describe a critical concept that we call *specificity*.

Led by Jeff Spence and Hakhamanesh Mostafavi:
How do GWAS and rare variant burden tests rank gene signals?

In new work @nature.com with @hakha.bsky.social, @jkpritch.bsky.social, and our wonderful coauthors we find that the key factors are what we call Specificity, Length, and Luck!

🧬🧪🧵

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Specificity, length and luck drive gene rankings in association studies - Nature
Genetic association tests prioritize candidate genes based on different criteria.
www.nature.com
November 7, 2025 at 4:08 AM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Very cool! I agree AI scientific review can be useful if it is transparent. It is all progressing very fast and will change everything. @qedScience @bioRxiv is a great first step. We are doing some human-based eval, so more soon from @EMBOPress @ReviewCommons with @qedScience. Watch this space ;-)
November 6, 2025 at 3:21 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
IT'S HAPPENING! 💥 I'm psyched to launch the collaboration between @qedscience.bsky.social & @openrxiv.bsky.social @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social! Preprint + q.e.d = your science is out there, and anyone can appreciate it. Let's care about making discoveries, and not on “getting published” (1/3) 👇
November 6, 2025 at 2:49 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Our revised consensus transcriptional patient map of human heart failure across patient cohorts and single-cell and bulk technologies is now published @natcomms.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...
What are the key disrupted multicellular processes in heart failure? In our new work we combine 23 years of molecular data with recent single-cell atlases to draw a cross-study patient map
doi.org/10.1101/2024...
November 6, 2025 at 12:10 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Let’s talk about rare variant association tests - we have a new method that helps you discover more with the same data! It’s called *FlexRV* to signal our approach: “flexibly modeling rare variant pathogenicity improves gene discovery for complex traits”. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Flexibly Modeling Rare Variant Pathogenicity Improves Gene Discovery for Complex Traits
Rare variant burden tests can directly identify genes that influence complex traits, but their power is limited by our ability to separate functional from benign alleles. We introduce FlexRV, an appro...
www.biorxiv.org
November 5, 2025 at 10:29 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Bacteria can sense when a virus starts shredding their genome — by detecting methylated mononucleotides.
Here’s the story of how we discovered the Metis defense system 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
November 6, 2025 at 5:00 AM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Happy to see our HT-PELSA paper now published in @natsmb.nature.com 🎊 Big thanks for the constructive review process! 📖Read the manuscript here (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) & check the thread for additional information ⬇️
November 5, 2025 at 10:15 AM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
A functional map of CDK-drug interactions at single amino acid resolution https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.02.685764v1
November 4, 2025 at 2:49 AM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Just tried q.e.d. by @odedrechavi.bsky.social et al. with a few papers including by myself & others where I knew a claim within was flawed based on a misunderstanding of the signal.

1) it was impressive. I see what the hype is about.
2) it hallucinated.

www.qedscience.com

Overly long #SciPub🧵 1/n
q.e.d Science
Critical Thinking AI for constructive criticism and science evaluation
www.qedscience.com
November 1, 2025 at 12:15 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
🚨Our collaboration with @centriolelab.bsky.social & @gautamdey.bsky.social is out today in @cp-cell.bsky.social
We show that #Expansion #Microscopy is a broad-spectrum modality for Euks, enabling 3D phenotypic maps rooted to phylogeny.
#ProtistsOnSky #SciComm #SciSky

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...
October 31, 2025 at 2:42 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Our congratulations to @skinnider.bsky.social!
October 30, 2025 at 1:59 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
📣 We are moving to Barcelona to join the amazing @crg.eu and explore how centrosomes & cilia work, evolve & respond to the environment. We are looking for
PhD students www.crg.eu/en/content/t...
Postdocs gimm.pt/jobs/postdoc...
Other calls to open, also for an experienced lab manager.
Get in touch!
October 30, 2025 at 1:15 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
How can we study target engagement and selectivity of covalent inhibitors? Which electrophilic probes are best suited to study a certain amino acid?

Our study on "Profiling the proteome-wide selectivity of diverse electrophiles" is published in Nature Chemistry.(1/7)

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Profiling the proteome-wide selectivity of diverse electrophiles - Nature Chemistry
Covalent inhibitors are powerful entities in drug discovery. Now the amino acid selectivity and reactivity of a diverse electrophile library have been assessed proteome-wide using an unbiased workflow...
www.nature.com
October 30, 2025 at 10:27 AM
On my train back home from a two day visit to @embo.org The EMBL Heidelberg campus is always so beautiful in the autumn. Brings back memories of my PhD times.
October 29, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
OF consortium members will be releasing new capabilities soon, starting today w/Nvidia’s OF3p NIM, which delivers major speedups and streamlines production deployments. catalog.ngc.nvidia.com/orgs/nim/tea...
OpenFold3 | NVIDIA NGC
OpenFold3 is a widely used model for predicting the 3D structures of biomolecular complexes from the amino acid sequences, dna sequences, rna sequences, and ligand specifiers for the molecules in the ...
catalog.ngc.nvidia.com
October 28, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
OpenFold3-preview (OF3p) is out: a sneak peek of our AF3-based structure prediction model. Our aim for OF3 is full AF3-parity for every modality. We now believe we have a clear path towards this goal and are releasing OF3p to enable building in the OF3 ecosystem. More👇
October 28, 2025 at 6:30 PM
Looks like OpenFold3 has been formally released in a public "preview". Not quite on parity with AlphaFold3 on a few benchmarks shown, in particular for antibody interactions. All info on the github link. I am sure we will hear more about this from the developers github.com/aqlaboratory...
GitHub - aqlaboratory/openfold-3: OpenFold3: A fully open source biomolecular structure prediction model based on AlphaFold3
OpenFold3: A fully open source biomolecular structure prediction model based on AlphaFold3 - aqlaboratory/openfold-3
github.com
October 28, 2025 at 9:30 AM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Univ. of Utah & Huntsman Cancer Institute are seeking tenure-track faculty in cancer biology (broadly defined), especially in combining experimental & computational structural approaches (incl. AlphaFold & other AI/LLM tools) to study cancer-relevant signaling.
utah.peopleadmin.com/postings/189...
Assistant, Associate to Professor DOQ
utah.peopleadmin.com
October 28, 2025 at 7:56 AM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Treatment of triple-negative breast cancer is clinically challenging. A recent study from the Bodenmiller at ETH Zurich proposes a new patient stratification method to better predict recurrence risk and direct therapy. More: biol.ethz.ch/en/news-and-...
October 27, 2025 at 1:18 PM
Reposted by Pedro Beltrao
Hot off the press! Our paper, “Global comparative structural analysis of responses to protein phosphorylation”, is now out in Nature Communications!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Global comparative structural analysis of responses to protein phosphorylation - Nature Communications
Phosphorylation is central to protein regulation, yet its structural mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, the authors conduct a global, systematic analysis of phosphorylated versus non-phosphory...
www.nature.com
October 27, 2025 at 10:29 AM