Roger Castells
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rcastellsg.bsky.social
Roger Castells
@rcastellsg.bsky.social
💼 Junior Group Leader at CNIO @cniostopcancer.bsky.social

🔬Designing proteins and studying their structure

#cryoEM #proteindesign #ai #ml

🎓 Alumni @ UCLA, John Innes Centre, UAB

🌍 Lab website: https://www.rcglab.com
Reposted by Roger Castells
🎉Congratulations to @victorsmh6.bsky.social at the GMI of the @oeaw.bsky.social who received the @viennabiocenter.bsky.social PhD Award for his thesis “Leveraging evolutionary diversity to discover new autophagy mechanisms in plants”.

More about Victor here: www.oeaw.ac.at/gmi/detail/n...
November 10, 2025 at 2:59 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
An Asgard archaeon with internal membrane compartments

Brilliant study led by @fmacleod.bsky.social and Andriko von Kügelgen. Tight collaboration with @buzzbaum.bsky.social and lab. Congrats to all authors!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
November 7, 2025 at 10:44 AM
Reposted by Roger Castells
Glad to see our antibody design paper finally out in
@nature.com
(and congrats to lead authors and everyone involved )!
At Xaira we are excited about pushing antibody design further to bind harder targets and make drugs for unmet medical needs.
Paper:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
November 5, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
New lab / new life 🌱

The Julian Lab is now open at the Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (IMPB), BOKU University 🇦🇹

We explore how plants defend their vacuoles and how vacuoles defend them! 🛡️

Excited to collaborate with @angegross.bsky.social’s lab.

#PlantBiology #Vacuole #VQC #BOKU #IMPB
October 29, 2025 at 2:46 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
In @nature.com: Using AI and other cutting-edge techniques, the Klinge lab has captured the first near-continuous "molecular movie" of ribosome formation—revealing, frame by frame, how cells build the protein factories that make life possible.

More here: https://bit.ly/3LbHTaF
October 29, 2025 at 5:22 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
For obvious reasons, I've become fascinated with retrotransposons. So we ( @alexwhiteley.bsky.social and I) wrote an article now out in Neuron @cellpress.bsky.social on how we think retrotransposons influence brain function and health! kwnsfk27.r.eu-west-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F...
October 20, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
Check out our latest work on the discovery and engineering of PiggyBac transposases! 🧵
October 2, 2025 at 6:09 PM
We’re looking for an enthusiastic postdoc to join our team. 😊

The project focuses on protein design and cryo-EM applied to cancer research. 🔬🧪

The position is fully funded for 3 years.

Please share 🙏

Job description and application details (deadline: October 11th): www.cnio.es/en/empleo/po...
Postdoctoral Research Assistant for the Biomolecular Design and Structural Nanomedicine Group
DescriptionWe are looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher to join Roger Castells-Graells’ lab at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO). The successful candidate will work on innovative biom...
www.cnio.es
October 5, 2025 at 2:32 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
If you’re applying to your dream lab for an internship/PhD/postdoc, always send a second email 1-2 weeks after the first one if you don’t hear back.

I promise we will be grateful rather than annoyed. My email inbox is a disaster and I’m quite junior - and very few of us have secretarial support
October 4, 2025 at 5:47 AM
Reposted by Roger Castells
Test the activity of 300+ natural enzymes against 100+ substrates, discover 200+ new enzymatic reactions, and train machine learning models to predict which enzymes can do which reactions.

@aepaton.bsky.social @gabegomes.bsky.social @alisonnarayan.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
October 2, 2025 at 8:11 PM
Wow! So cool to see new mysterious protein complexes 🤩 so much to discover 🔬
I am excited to share our new preprint on the CAGE complex, a mysterious hollow protein complex that I first saw years ago while surveying Tetrahymena ciliary lysate www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #cilia #protistsonsky 🧬🧪
September 23, 2025 at 10:20 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
🥳Congrats to Prof. David Eisenberg, who has been awarded the 2026 Gregori Aminoff Prize in Crystallography by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences! www.chemistry.ucla.edu/news/david-e...
September 23, 2025 at 9:34 PM
This is super cool and great investigative work! Thanks Oli and co! #smallparticles #cryoEM
This one is a bit of a departure from the usual and definitely a work in progress!

We found that by using ab initio reconstruction at very high res, in very small steps, we could crack some small structures that had eluded us - e.g. 39kDa iPKAc (EMPIAR-10252), below.

Read on for details... 1/x
September 13, 2025 at 9:30 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
Bugs on Flowers
August 3, 2025 at 10:22 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
Verano de bachillerato en el laboratorio: Aitana Soler y Jan Magem viven la realidad de la investigación científica en #CNIOStopCancer con el programa ‘Jóvenes y ciencia’ de la Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera. Han trabajado un mes junto a @rcastellsg.bsky.social, que también participó en el programa
July 30, 2025 at 12:37 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
I am super excited to announce that I will be starting my lab at the Department of Pharmacology of the University of Zurich in Switzerland next year!
July 25, 2025 at 7:48 AM
Reposted by Roger Castells
You designed binders for your favourite protein and wish there was a way to experimentally screen them within 24h w/ only a set of pipettes and a plate reader?

Check out our Cell-Free 2-Hybrid approach (CF2H)

Full post: tinyurl.com/48cz5nb6

Preprint: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...
July 17, 2025 at 11:42 AM
Reposted by Roger Castells
I just published: Why I’m skipping the Congress this year (And why you should still publish your posters)

Publishing your poster creates a citable record and protects you from bad actors.

#ISMPMI2025 #OpenMPMI #AcademicChatter #PhDchat

medium.com/p/why-im-ski...
Why I’m skipping the Congress this year (And why you should still publish your posters)
Publishing your poster creates a verifiable and citable record of your work. It also protects you from bad actors — the evidence will be…
medium.com
July 11, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
Today in the journal Science: BioEmu from Microsoft Research AI for Science. This generative deep learning method emulates protein equilibrium ensembles – key for understanding protein function at scale. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
July 10, 2025 at 6:10 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
There is no better feeling than to see people in your lab succeed!
July 11, 2025 at 6:47 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
In situ insights into antibody-mediated neutralization of a pre-fusion Junin virus glycoprotein complex @cp-cellreports.bsky.social @rcastellsg.bsky.social
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
July 10, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
Our latest preprint is now available doi.org/10.1101/2025...! Led by my postdoc, Luqiang Guo @luqiang.bsky.social, we determined a ~2.4 A resolution structure of the hantavirus glycoprotein tetramer on the surface of VLPs. Also determined structures of dimers of tetramers and Fab-bound tetramers.
June 18, 2025 at 2:24 PM
Reposted by Roger Castells
My last day at the @gmivienna.bsky.social & @viennabiocenter.bsky.social. Here’s what I accumulated at my (office) 🚪 🧵 1/advice from my daughters
July 3, 2025 at 1:23 PM
Honored and grateful to receive the Hawk Biosystems Award from the Spanish Biophysical Society 🙏 Thank you very much for this recognition! :)
June 28, 2025 at 11:03 AM