Very excited to share this work led by Austin Link, a graduate student in our lab. We have discovered a novel, fig-associated microbe that promotes reproductive success via variable life history mechanisms in two nematode species. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Check out our preprint investigating host use in sympatric Caenorhabditis nematodes! We found three Caenorhabditis species in a local community are associated with different invert taxa, and document a strong association between one species and invasive nitidulid beetles. doi.org/10.64898/202...

Multidisciplinary training, over time, produces the highest impact people www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Sunday run

GWAS has been an incredible discovery tool for human genetics: it regularly identifies *causal* links from 1000s of SNPs to any given trait. But mechanistic interpretation is usually difficult. Our latest work on causal models for this is out yesterday: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short🧵:

Investigating the differential microRNAs expression in young and aged Drosophila melanogaster following Flock House Virus infection www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... New paper! Congrats to all authors! @jannafierst.bsky.social

This surprisingly relaxing footage is from SIX MILES under the ocean – and it’s the deepest ecosystem yet discovered

I used inducible CRISPR/Cas9 to make Trypanosoma brucei cell line that allowed me to edit originally muti-copy histone gene. We uncovered a novel role of H4 histone tail in gene regulation. I enjoyed working on this exciting project with @joanarcf.bsky.social, a great mentor. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Excited to contribute to the Mitoribosome collaborative study led by @wredenberglab.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com🎉 "The mitochondrial methylation potential gates mitoribosome assembly" The assembly starts before the completion of the rRNA gene cluster processing🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Delighted to post some cool science - a collaboration with my former grad students Cassandre and Jill, and collaborator extraordinaire @erynmcfarlane.bsky.social! doi.org/10.1093/jher...

My quote of the day I kept a diary right after I was born. Day 1: Tired from the move. Day 2: Everyone thinks I'm an idiot. Steven Wright

Despite all that is going on, we are still all working on our science. Our 2nd collaboration with @jisaacmurray.bsky.social‬ and Bob Waterston (UW) is out: Lineage-resolved analysis of embryonic gene expression evolution in C. elegans and C. briggsae | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Very happy (and frankly relieved) to see this paper finally out in peer-reviewed form. (Preprint was posted in August 2021, but this is the world we live in now). rdcu.be/erMk6

🚨📢 New paper alert! A study led by Kirsten Senti and Julius Brennecke offers new insights into how ancient endogenous retroviruses diversified to exploit different cell “niches” in the fruit fly ovary, and how the host’s defenses adapted in return. https://imba.science/Brennecke_EMBOJ

Nematode towers that you can get to grow in lab using C. elegans. Maybe a new, tractable model system for studying self-organization in the lab. 🧪 "Towering behavior and collective dispersal in Caenorhabditis nematodes" by Perez et al. (2025, Current Biology) www.cell.com/current-biol...

Great work by Changde Du from Huiguang He's lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. How similar are visual and conceptual representations in (multimodal) large language models to those found in humans? It turns out quite similar! www.nature.com/articles/s42...

It won’t last long but for the first time since November 26 I have no outstanding grant or manuscript reviews 🥳

This is our cultural revolution and in many ways it’s already done.

1/5 We introduce Movi Color, led by Steven Tan (a brilliant undergrad member of Langmead lab) for taxonomic and multi-class classification. It uses a full-text index based on the move structure and does not rely on predefined values (like k-mer length) for index building. github.com/mohsenzakeri...

OUT NOW: Structural insights into light harvesting by antenna-containing rhodopsins in marine #Asgard #archaea @bejalab.bsky.social @labinoue.bsky.social #microsky 🦠🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Your regular reminder about why you should publish in @jevbio.bsky.social:

My ongoing request: If your NSF or NIH grant was terminated--whether at Harvard or elsewhere--please report it here. NSF: grant-watch.us/submit-nsf.h... NIH: grant-watch.us/submit-nih.h... Our trackers are actively used in lawsuits and are often the only record that terminations ever occurred.

AAAAHHHHHH

In this new publication, we took #archaea for a walk in the chemical garden 😉. The abiotic hydrogen produced in this setting can fuel M. jannaschii’s metabolism. Great interdisciplinary collaboration with the Orsi lab who initiated and led this study. More here www.nature.com/articles/s41...

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Nearly missed my bus stop reading this fascinating review :)

🙏 We need your help 🙏 The government continues to cancel grants at both NIH and NSF to censor science it doesn't like. We're tracking terminations to organize and advocate. Please report your terminated grants: NIH: forms.gle/J2znQ7y7YpeP... NSF: airtable.com/appGKlSVeXni... w/ @noamross.net

There's been credible info of intent to delete National Science Foundation (NSF) awards from Research.gov databases during planned downtime, so I grabbed all awards from 1960 to present and uploaded them to a free and open research repository. Please share! dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtm...

Our study exploring the evolutionary mechanism of alphavirus opal codon retention is now online! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

“Failure to object, when it is your duty to object, makes cowards of men.” —Abraham Lincoln

Proud of this work, led by the amazing Jeannette Tenthorey (now Assistant Professor at UCSF), demonstrating the adaptive power of single indel mutations in host-virus arms races, but a little sad that this is the coda to her amazing postdoc in the Malik & Emerman labs. www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

One of the most powerful moments of the day came from Emily Whitehead who told the story of how she was the first pediatric patient to receive CAR T-cell therapy for her leukemia at age 5: “I stand up for science because science saved my life. And that’s a fact.” @standupforscience.bsky.social

Massachusetts launches a website to hire federal workers who have been laid off. www.mass.gov/federal-work...

Great job alert: ProPublica is hiring a computational journalist, "someone who will use technology and data to identify and unlock stories that would otherwise be out of reach." Salary: $120K-$140K Remote: ✅ Come join us!

NSF plans to reinstate all probationary employees who were fired on 18 Feb! NSF’s decision. 👏🏻👏🏻❤️

I work in amazing place: UNC-Chapel Hill Biology. Our faculty of ~50 includes folks engaged in both basic science & pedagogical research. We have an opening for a new Teaching Assistant or Associate Professor to join us in July 2025-happy to answer questions RT unc.peopleadmin.com/postings/297...

If you've been calling Congress, keep calling & if not, start-we're getting their attention. We had a good visit to a Congressional office yesterday to discuss science funding & the staffer told us how busy they've been-usually the Senate shwitchboard gets 64 calls/minute-now they're getting 1600 🧪

No, this is the most ashamed you've felt as an American *so far*.

Did you know? There’s a directory of Black farmers: “The Black Farmers Index.” Buy and uplift local. Many are small-scale specialists and located in urban areas. I found an organic resource in my area that I will definitely check out.

Tee for the day ❤️🩵💚💛💙❤️‍🩹

Pitt to pause PhD admissions, following Vanderbilt and USC, because of uncertainty of NIH funding to academic universities. Who will teach and train US scientists for pharma and biotech? Should we import them from countries that do? www.wesa.fm/health-scien...

I am thrilled to share our new review on holocentric chromosomes. It was a lot of fun to write it together with Ines Drinnenberg! Same but different: Centromere regulations in holocentric insects and plants doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

I managed to speak to a staffer at Rep. Maria Salazar's office and they said the mass firings is by far the biggest issue they're hearing about. Keep calling! I use the 5 Calls app. 5 Calls a day, keep going. Keep trying, especially in Republican states.

I want everyone to just take FIVE MINUTES, and take a look at this extremely well put together project 2025 tracker. www.project2025.observer We're less than a month in.

Still no SS meetings being posted to the Federal Register. www.federalregister.gov/documents/se...

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes…

If you wanted to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you would empower the inspectors general. If you wanted more waste, fraud, and abuse, you would fire them.

Revised version: Triangle scientists: Wednesday I'm going to go to Senator Tillis' Raleigh office in person. Anyone who wants to join me email me [email protected] (my 1st plan was derailed upon realizing that while I have to work Monday, Federal employees who were not yet fired have Presidents Day off

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

BREAKING: A federal court temporarily blocked President Trump’s executive order aiming to restrict access to gender-affirming medical care for transgender people under age 19 nationwide. This is a major victory for our freedom to access life-saving care.