Researchers recorded from single neurons across frontotemporal cortex in 8 awake individuals during natural speech. They show how activities of collections of cells can capture syntactic & semantic properties of words, & also dynamically incorporate sentence context to encode combinatorial info. 🗣️🧠🧪

🧬 🧪Our RNA velocity benchmark is out in PLOS Comp Biol We tested 5 methods on mouse & zebrafish data. They often disagree (just 1/100 driver genes shared 😬). A hypothesis tool, not ground truth. Open access 👉 doi.org/10.1371/jour... Led by the brilliant Sarah Ancheta (not on bsky)

New preprint from our lab on bioRxiv: “Stoichiometric transcription factor partnerships control GABAergic neuron fate allocation” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A great collaboration with @annrosebright.bsky.social, Connor Lynch, @chr-mayer.bsky.social, and many others.

#Science #Biologie  🦇 « L’évolution des mécanismes du développement » 🖥️ Les vidéos du colloque organisé par le Pr @denisduboule.bsky.social#Science#Biologie titulaire de la chaire #Évolution du développement et des #génomes, sont disponibles ! 👉 https://tinyurl.com/39p4h5pn

Sun et al, 2026. NuRD-enabled CTCF-TET crosstalk orchestrates epigenome reprogramming and genome architecture www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Bumble bees can apparently play with balls, count, recognize faces, & perceive rhythm. A new study out today in @science.org argues they can also solve novel tasks spontaneously without explicit training, challenging the idea that such cognitive skills are exclusive to large-brained vertebrates.😲🐝🧪👇

Exciting breakthrough technology from the lab, now live in @cellcellpress.bsky.social ! Instead of cutting the genome where proteins bind (e.g., Cut&Tag), D&D-seq scars the DNA with a deaminase, allowing single cell genome mapping of TFs and chromatin remodellers!

Single Cell Genomics Day: A (Virtual) Practical Workshop. June 12, 2026, organized by @nygenome.org's Rahul Satija Free, livestreamed, no registration.

Out now in Science! Our study challenges long-standing assumptions about transcription factor specificity in eukaryotes. Novel single-molecule measurements of TF behavior in living cells reveal an independence of locus-specific binding from DNA sequence recognition.🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Single-cell proteomics illuminated new mechanisms of mammalian development. We found that spatially polarized protein distributions and intracellular protein gradients emerge during the earliest stages of mammalian embryogenesis and bias subsequent cell fate decisions. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

This a very important, and extremely well-executed study from Ralph Grand’s group @uniheidelberg.bsky.social. Congrats to all the authors! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Smell is topographically organized after all. A spatial code governs olfactory receptor choice and aligns sensory maps in the nose and brain: Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Can we control cells by forcing TFs to collaborate? Interested? Read our preprint! An awesome collaboration with @cgersbach.bsky.social, @igvfconsortium.bsky.social, Christian McRoberts Amador, @rachel-savage.bsky.social: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵

Unstructured transcription factor interactions enable emergent specificity www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - such an interesting paper!

Awesome gift to the research community: a compendium of transcriptomic data for the exploration of neocortical development—gene-level transcriptomic data from ~200(!!!) studies of neocortical development & in vitro models Thanks @carlocolantuoni.bsky.social & colleagues 🙏 @natneuro.nature.com 🧪🧠

TFs search are governed by many parameters, what about electrostatic forces? @simsakong.bsky.social led a multi-scale study on Sox2 revealing how electrostatic interactions influence its search. In close collaboration with @davidsuter.bsky.social. Congratulations Sim 🎉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m thrilled to share that my PhD work has been just published in Cell. After a long and bumpy ride, we uncovered the core function of nuclear speckles -splicing of GC-levelled exons- and traced the evolution of this gene architecture and condensates themselves to amniotes.

We wrote a perspective "How to build the regulatory genome: a constructionist guide to the cis-regulatory code", out in Development yesterday. Title says it all. Find it here: journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

📢 Hiring! Our group @ncmbm.bsky.social seeks a Research Scientist contributing to: • Reproducible pipelines for large-scale genomics • cisreg signature analysis in breast cancer • Continued development of JASPAR • Cross-disciplinary collaboration Apply now 👉 www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

CellRank protocol now in @NatureProtocols! 🎉 @PhilippWeiler's detailed guide shows how to: - Integrate velocity, pseudotime & time points - Infer cell fate probabilities - Analyze lineage priming at scale Great complement to our CellRank 2 paper! 📖 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I've started my own lab 🎉 PhD/postdoc positions available - reach out if curious about cerebellum evo-devo and autism spectrum disorders. We’re based at Uni Tartu, Institute of Genomics (home to Estonian Biobank), and funded by @simonsfoundation.org @embo.org, and the Estonian Research Council.

We are thrilled that our study on the evolution of gene regulation in mammalian cerebellum development – led by @ioansarr.bsky.social, @marisepp.bsky.social and @tyamadat.bsky.social, in collaboration with @steinaerts.bsky.social – is now out in @ScienceMagazine! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/ Our new study, led by Jingwen Ding, examines the role of transcription factors during human neurogenesis to identify gene regulatory networks influencing cell fate, maturation, and subtype specification www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Journals explaining why it takes 9 months to send back reviews

New preprint on technologies to scale up CRISPR screens. We use them to map 665,856 pairwise genetic perturbations and outline a path to comprehensive interaction mapping in human cells. We also introduce an approach for cloning lentiviral libraries with billions of elements.

Our review “A competition model of multilineage priming and cell-fate decisions” is out: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

🧬🔬@science.org A genetically encoded device for #transcriptome storage in mammalian cells | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... @broadinstitute.org

TF-MINDI is out! A new method to learn cis-regulatory codes through rich embeddings of TF binding sites. TF-MINDI decomposes motif neighbourhoods, and works downstream of any sequence-to-function deep learning model. We deeply study the enhancer code in human neural development, check out the thread

rdcu.be/eX8JD DRN new publication alert: Manning et al., 2025, @emmanning.bsky.social, co-led by Marysia Placzek and Elsie Place @elsieplace.bsky.social, in collaboration with Seth Blackshaw @sethblackshaw.bsky.social

Our paper on the newest version of the Registry of candidate cis-Regulatory Elements (cCREs) is out 🧬 Huge thanks to the many collaborators, experimentalists, analysts and software developers who made this work possible — truly a team effort! A "meme-torial" of the science is coming soon 👀

Self-organized or instructed? My @natrevgenet.nature.com Journal Club traces how classic papers revealed two modes of developmental patterning & why the debate between Turing and Wolpert is as timely as ever for organoid engineering today www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This went under the radar but answers a fundamental question in Epigenetics... From many hundreds of olfactory receptor genes, each neuron selects expression of only single one (near-randomly). How? Outstanding work from Mathieu Boulard and colleagues www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

As usual this time of year, started drafting the list of gene regulation conferences for 2026, enjoy! generegulation.org/conferences-... Know of a relevant event that’s missing? Please reply below

Join @stirlingchurchman.bsky.social, @moffittlab.bsky.social, @saramostafavi.bsky.social, me and all speakers for the 2026 CSHL meeting Systems Biology: Global Regulation of Gene Expression, March 11-14. Abstract deadline January 9! More infos and registration at meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...

A major output of the 4D Nucleome project appeared today. This is the joint effort of many scientists working together and (publicly) sharing data and results for several years. We hope this is of interest to many genome biologists! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Can one map the genome-wide binding (1) and its protein partners (2) simultaneously from the same sample? Yes, one can. with CUT&ID ✂️🪪 Spearheaded — singlehandedly — by @annanordin.bsky.social No need of transgenesis, cloning and overexpression. Check it out, it's fast and its works.

Great to see this published: Fitting dynamical landscape models to single-cell data, creating interpretable maps of cell decision making & developmental logic Applied to neural tube patterning, we show how morphogen signals reshape landscapes and drive fate decisions www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

📣 I hereby make my Bluesky debut to announce that our work linking DNA binding affinities and kinetics 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘪𝘵𝘳𝘰 and 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘰 for the human transcription factor KLF1 just got published in Cell! @cp-cell.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Key findings in a thread (1/6):

Do you have an exciting new chromatin/transcription story that you'd like to share with the #FN community? Fill out this form to be considered for a talk in our Jan-June 2026 schedule! forms.gle/TBi38UgYxPAB... Please repost and share!

New paper “Proteome-wide model for human disease genetics” is now live at Nature Genetics: rdcu.be/eRu7K popEVE (pop.evemodel.org) finds the needles in the haystacks of human genetic variation:

Fun week for DNA methylation research! Here is a thread of three cool papers that came out, all with an evolution angle. And a bonus 4th that examines DNAme/PcG interplay (certainly an interest for our lab!) #Epigenetics

Good to see the peer reviewed version of this in print The cis-regulatory logic integrating spatial and temporal patterning in the vertebrate neural tube A global temporal chromatin program operates across the vertebrate nervous system to control neural cell diversity www.cell.com/developmenta...

Our latest paper has just been published in Cell! doi.org/10.1016/j.ce... We developed a new method called MCC ultra, which allows 3D chromatin structure to be visualised with a 1 base pair pixel size.

🚀 Our new Science paper is out (w/ B DeMeo, D Burkhardt, A Shalek, M Cortes): www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... We show that active learning + transcriptomic perturbations can guide which exps to run next, boosting phenotypic hit rates >13x. AI not just predicting bio, but designing it. 🔁

Thrilled to share my main postdoc work with @jamesbriscoe.bsky.social We used genomic barcoding + scRNAseq in chick & human embryos to reveal a lineage architecture that reshapes how we understand neural tube development & cell fate decisions 🧵👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧵1/ Excited to share our new paper introducing a new #singlecell assay: scTF-seq, a high-throughput single-cell approach to explore how transcription factor (TF) dose shapes cell identity and reprogramming outcomes. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... Big congrats to the entire team @EPFL & @SIAT_China

Today in @nature.com, we present our work leveraging functional genomics and human blastoids to uncover a human-specific mechanism in preimplantation development driven by the endogenous retrovirus HERVK. Special thanks to the reviewers whose comments improved our manuscript a lot! rdcu.be/eI3tD