I think this article is brilliantly written and made me laugh out loud a few times. The very real challenge of separating hype from reality exists on both ends of the dystopia-utopia spectrum. harpers.org/archive/2026...

A fun (AI-enhanced) image of 12187 ABR waveforms. We used these data from our own lab and several others to train ABRA (PMID: 38948763) and are still using it to train next-gen machine learning models for cochlear studies. Stay tuned (no pun intended) for more!

Open-source, deep learning-based tool VASCilia enables rapid quantification & characterisation of stereocilia – advances capabilities in hearing research 📷 Yasmin M. Kassim et al @manorlaboratory.bsky.social @ucsandiego.bsky.social in @plosbiology.org ➡️ bpod.org.uk/archive/2026...

As Fran was nice enough to highlight this, I thought I'd put up a brief thread. 3 in 10 proteins that our cells make are either embedded in membranes (ion channels, adhesion molecules, etc.) or secreted (insulin, antibodies). They move through the secretory pathway. 1/

🚀 Registration is NOW OPEN for AIMS 2026! Join us at UC San Diego for the premier workshop on AI for Multimodal Science. Secure your spot (Deadline March 7): 👉 Register: tinyurl.com/AIMS2026 🔗 Website: aims-2026.vercel.app

Press release on our paper: today.ucsd.edu/story/new-ai...

Does anyone understand how the AC meeting is literally the day after Study Section? Don't they need summary statements for this? I have been refreshing my commons page every minute to see if there is a score/summary statement, but in reality this would be unprecedented speed? What am I missing?

So excited to see Yasmin’s beautiful paper is finally out! We hope this tool will be useful for everyone studying stereocilia bundles (including companies developing gene therapies). I fantasized about having an AI tool like this when I was a grad student. All the code and data is open source.

Cochlear hair cell #stereocilia bundles are vital for hearing, but what is their 3D morphology? @manorlaboratory.bsky.social present VASCilia, a tool that automates analysis of 3D #ConfocalMicroscopy datasets of phalloidin-stained #CochlearHairCell bundles @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3NSHdYW

It took me >3 hours to update my @NIH ScienCV biosketch to meet new formatting requirements. These formats are often updated, forcing every one of ~45,000 NIH PI's to spend time on this. Assuming *minimum wage* ~$20/hour and my experience was average, this amounts to $3M/update.

I'm so happy to have gotten the opportunity to work on this project and I'm SO excited that they selected our image for the cover!

The original proposal's critique scores. I don't know how we are supposed to succeed in such a capricious system.

Emotional - Uri Manor @manorlaboratory.bsky.social was so wonderfully open & an inspiration to listen on #TheMicroscopists Uri talks about growing up with hearing loss & a winding path through baseball-music-restaurant work led him to physics & then biology - pls share Stream bit.ly/microscopist...

Initial submission of a grant received a 15%-ile score. But we had to submit as new since the PAR expired. We submitted an even stronger, but just slightly modified version to address any/all weaknesses in the prior summary statement. Just found out it was "Not Discussed"😱

Can someone please connect me with someone at FDA CDER (or with expertise thereof) to discuss the pathway to approval for n-of-1 & n-of-many ASOs? I've got some pretty technical questions too involved to describe here.

Flagellar length control in Chlamydomonas is a paradigm for organelle size regulation. In poster 163 at CellBio2025 Sunday Dec 7, I present work by Hiro Ishikawa using a synthetic biology approach to test a length-sensing model based on diffusion of kinesin in flagella

Flagellar length control in Chlamydomonas is a paradigm for organelle size regulation. In poster 155 at the CellBio2025 meeting Sunday Dec 7, Ximena Garcia Arceo uses Lithium, which increases intraflagellar transport, as a tool to probe how length-altering mutants work.

Best email I ever got after a talk 🥹🥹🥹

Off to a great start!

My tenure talk is tomorrow 😅😅😅😅😅

Omg this is amazing. Fun fact: my original PhD goal was to study magnetoreception but no PIs were interested and someone suggested I study hair cells as an analogous system. Turns out they were even more analogous than we imagined!!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A holiday demonstration of the different penetration depths of red and blue light into tissue. #optics

Attempt number seven at uploading this video of intermediate filaments in an enormous COS7 cell. I have a feeling the BlueSky compression will not do it any favors.

Important for reviewers and people interpreting reviews of their grants

As someone with Connexin-26 (GJB2) mutations, I've managed to so far study most forms of hearing loss that do NOT involve GJB2. As a cell biologist, I've managed to study ER-organelle related processes and disorders with minimal connection to hearing loss. Now this paper drops.

Looking forward to some "inner ear evangelism" in ~30 minutes (signup link in comments)

We are hiring an Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. Come join our collaborative research environment with state-of-the-art facilities in NYC! Application review starts Oct 22. biochem.weill.cornell.edu/join-our-fac...

Preparing an RNAseq experiment

Following this pattern I’ve been able to write a set of skills that turns Claude Code into a scientific literature searching tool, compiling lists of relevant papers. I’ll make it public after some more work.

15 years in the making, we confirmed that mitochondria - the powerhouse of the cell - have an unusual localization in patients who experience psychosis (including schizophrenia and bipolar disorders). You’ll never guess what kind of patient cells we used to make this discovery… 🧵

The things I’ve learned about drug development in the last few weeks are astounding. Our society & economy are centuries behind our science & it is devastating to think about all the parents and children who are held captive. www.statnews.com/2025/10/09/c...

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

I've once again found myself in the news for unfortunate reasons. I must be cursed, or perhaps the universe is just balanced and all the positive press I've gotten for our work just needs to counteracted with some negativity www.youtube.com/shorts/kkmYw...

Learn all things #cytoskeleton #research in an interdisciplinary environment at EMBO Workshop "Structure and Function of the Cytoskeleton" in Paris, FR, 7–10 April 2026. Deadline: 20 December 2025 https://meetings.embo.org/event/26-cytoskeleton#cytoskeleton#research#EMBOCytoskeletalFunction #EMBOevents #conference 🧪

For the attention of all the Organelle researchers in Germany, the Annual meeting of the @gbmev.bsky.social study section Cellular Organelles will be held in Düsseldorf …. Seats fast filling up … please submit your abstract … information below: gbm-online.de/de/tagungska...

For academic purposes, I generated 100 UMAPs from the same tabular raw data, I sorted them and the result looks too funny to not share it with you 😃 haesleinhuepf.github.io/BioImageAnal...

The stories in this article are a huge part of what motivated me to start studying rare disease, which is actually one of the most common diseases (~10% of people have a rare disease) These Patients Got the Cure. Then It Went Away. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/h...

Soooooo what happens to all the NIH study sections in October if the government shutdown lasts 30+ days like last time? 😬😬😬

#GEF25 the expansion microscopy community would benefit from high NA, long working distance water objectives. Who's working on these? What's out there?

I enjoyed doing this podcast interview which was just released but was actually recorded almost a year ago. A little sad to listen to it now knowing only in retrospect that my funding was about to get demolished 😅😭. But overall I still have the same hope and dreams. open.spotify.com/episode/1rjG...

I enjoyed doing this podcast interview which was just released but was actually recorded almost a year ago. A little sad to listen to it now knowing only in retrospect that my funding was about to get demolished 😅😭. But overall I still have the same hope and dreams. open.spotify.com/episode/1rjG...

I have recently used abranalysis (from the GitHub repo) for analysis of a couple of recent datasets and it does a very nice job once I account for the acoustic latency differences. I just had to put our data into the right intermediate format, which was a simple process. Very nice contribution!

2/2: ABRA, which can automatically analyze auditory brainstem response electrophysiology data from a broad range of mice with varying levels of hearing function/loss. New features in the open-source, free-to-use software (hosted on the San Diego Supercomputer Center!) increase usability and control.

Pleased to share updates for 2 deep learning papers: 1/2: VASCilia, which can automatically segment and analyze cochlear hair cell stereocilia bundles. We have added more features to the Napari plugin and some new data highlighting the power of our high-throughput automated 3D analysis approach.

Pleased to share updates for 2 deep learning papers: 1/2: VASCilia, which can automatically segment and analyze cochlear hair cell stereocilia bundles. We have added more features to the Napari plugin and some new data highlighting the power of our high-throughput automated 3D analysis approach.

Proud to announce that our superstar postdoc Yasmin Kassim was awarded a Schmidt AI in Science fellowship! Check out her recently updated VASCilia paper and then ponder the fact that this barely scratches the surface of what we’ve done and will be doing more of together 🙌🙌🙌

I love SciSky, great term.

Flying out of San Jose buzzing after @chanzuckerberg.bsky.social #ImagingTheFuture. Amazing to shake the hands of long time insprations: @andrewgyork.bsky.social @makertobey.bsky.social @manorlaboratory.bsky.social & new ones like Gustavo Menezes—plus catching up with friends & collaborators!

SciSky: what’s your favorite software or algorithm for designing siRNA? Bonus points if we can use it to add mismatches to improve allele specificity!

DSIR A 2 decades old algorithm (Outch) co-developed by my ex-boss. More than 1 year and hundreds of sequences have been experimentally tested to valide the tool, which at the time was quite some work. biodev.cea.fr/DSIR/