Fine-tuning GPT-4o mini on amino acid sequence with biological significance text + structural features mapping enables *function-directed* protein design! Folks @ Retro achieved 50x improvement on iPSC generation using engineered versions of OSKM over wild-type! 🧪🧬💻👾 openai.com/index/accele...

Big step forward in phenotype-directed drug discovery: By learning the latent representation of phenotype space, they speed up and directly learn the phenotype transition --> perturbagen mapping. Super cool!! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #AI #drugdiscovery #cancer

New collaborative paper between JPArmache and Bowman (@bowmanlab-jhu.bsky.social) labs show how the yeast CHD1 chromatin remodeler depends on activator elements to distort nucleosomal DNA. This explains how the NegC inhibitor blocks activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Beautiful foggy morning run on Martha’s Vineyard… a little time away from the lab goes a long way to help keep me focused back in the lab!

Nice to see my colleague and friend Sangwoo’s PhD work out and about! Bravo, Dr Park!! 🎉

Great round up of cGAS-STING mediated dsDNA sensing with Zhijian Chen - lots to think about! #HarvardImmunology 🧪

Really nice seminar by Liling Wan here @DFCI! "Chromatin Regulation in Cancer: Molecular Insights and Therapeutic Opportunities" Many of the DFCI Seminars in Oncology are recorded and open to the public, enjoy! seminarsinoncology.dana-farber.org/2025.html 🧪

⚠️ Dangerous article alert ⚠️ This article makes huge, speculative leaps about treatment for a disease based only on correlative findings. Science communication matters 🧪

Actuarial studies aren’t going to convince anyone who wants to defund the #NIH but in terms of ROI that seems like a pretty solid multiple, not to mention the benefits to life and health! 🧪

Interested in joining an exciting new translational gyn/onc research group?! Check out my colleague Jess St. Laurent’s group at MGB and Harvard Medical School! I cannot recommend Dr St Laurent as a mentor highly enough, she is brilliant, passionate, kind & dedicated! 🧪 www.stlaurentlab.org/join

Genome-coverage single-cell histone modifications for embryo lineage tracing www.nature.com/articles/s4...

In the most recent episode of the Epigenetics Podcast, we talked with Geeta Narlikar from UCSF about her work on chromatin remodeling, Heterochromatin Protein 1, and the molecular mechanisms that influence the genome. #podcast #epigenetics Listen here: buff.ly/4ibPPUD

It turns out I am a stage of lymphocyte differentiation, apparently a CLP gives rise to a fully differentiated @aido! File under: Things I learn in lab meetings

Is anyone aware of an exhaustive list of all human histone PTMs identified? Something like CST’s, except (1) continuously updated and (2) describing the actual modification (e.g. ‘symmetric dimethylation’, instead of ‘methylation’)… #epigenetics #biochemisty 🧬🧪

Super paper out of the Voigt group, that answers some longstanding questions about bivalent #histone marks! They show asymmetric bivalency recruits repressive readers (but not H3K4me3 readers) and have emergent properties that neither of the two alone do (e.g. recruitment of KAT6B complex)! 🧪

The world lost a truly brilliant scientist & professor Dickson epitomized the joyful curiosity, collaboration and broadly engaging nature that is the whole point of academic science He inspired me to join Columbia PhD program and no doubt inspired countless more around the world on TWiV & TWiP 🧬🦠 🧪

Super nice cancer #biomarker study! Low cost, and fairly sensitive, making strides toward a screening test for early-stage pancreatic #cancer. Doesn’t appear to be *quite* specific enough for use in broad populations but looks promising! Early detection in pancreatic cancer will be game-changer 🧪

These moves feel targeted at the big, elite research institutes - and no doubt it hurts - but often labs at the big research schools have private funding to buffer #NIH losses. Make no mistake, this will hurt *all research* but especially smaller, local universities and new labs

The Boston sunset view from my bench never gets old! 🧪

Finally had a chance to read this one from Rabadan group @columbiamed.bsky.social It’s amazing the information stored in accessibility profiles! The generalized expression model they learned can accurately predict TF activity & interactions and infer cis regulatory elements #epigenetics 🧪 🧬

Affected by #NIH and #NFS funding cuts? Considering a move abroad to escape? I haven't advertised this yet, but I have fresh funding for 2 senior #postdoc positions in #oxford. If you're into #Cancer #genomics and #epigenetics then get in touch. Please RT 🙏

Hey science 🧪 bluesky! Anyone have suggestions for benchtop bioprocess controllers / bioreactors for mammalian cell culture? I’m looking at the Eppendorf SciVario Twin (maybe 320?) or the Thermo G3Lab system. Any other systems I should consider? Thanks! 🧬 🧫 🦠

Awesome recap, so many exciting developments!!

🔬Decoding Silencing: How Heterochromatin Transcribes to Silence Itself! 🧬 Discover how a pioneer transcription factor-like complex infiltrates repressive heterochromatin, producing transcripts with hidden introns that kickstart RNAi-mediated heterochromatin formation www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We often speak about chromatin as being accessible or inaccessible, but what does it mean? We wrote a short review on this, 🔬 focused: sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A big thank you to Tom Fillot for his efforts on this and to @hansen_lab @marcelonollmann for their help as editors.

Very cool tool to systematically study enhancer-promoter functional interactions! Beautiful work, @jk-swietek.bsky.social!

Really nice, sweeping overview of the role and key regulators of chromatin accessibility across a wide range of diseases. Great review for anyone getting started in the #epigenetics and #chromatin fields!

Hey #Epigenetics folks! I made a starter pack, please comment below if you’d like to be added or have any suggestions for great epigenetics researcher I’ve missed! Cheers! 🧪🧬🔬 go.bsky.app/7JubtEj

Aged lung adult stem cells are less susceptible to malignant transformation by kras + p53 mutation. Suggests that age-related loss of ‘stemness’ is associated with increased barrier to transformation. Demonstrating why it’s so important to directly test assumptions in biology! 🧪 🧬🔬 (1/3)

AI scientists (LLMs) control a highly automated lab to successfully design novel nanobodies showcasing its #AI potential to deliver scientific advances with minimal, high-level human oversight. 🧪

Toward a fully automated clinical pathologist! Very exciting use case for #AI models in #cancer research - could help enroll patients in clinical trials from community/smaller hospitals, a win for inclusion and equity in clinical stage research

Hey #epigenetics folks! Who am I missing here on @bsky.app? Tag below and I’ll add folks who do amazing epigenetic research!

"Dark TFs": new manuscript mapped 166 uncharacterized human transcription factors, finding half bind genomic "dark matter," often closed chromatin rich in transposable elements. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Asking your manager or mentor for constructive feedback can feel intimidating, but especially in academia where we don’t have annual reviews, intentionally seeking it out is an enormously powerful practice! 👏 @ Kisha Greer (Science)

Did y’all see that Beaver Moon last night?! Awesome show from the lab

New work from Joan Brugge's lab @harvardcellbio.bsky.social explores how Brca1 haploinsufficiency promotes early tumor onset and epigenetic alterations in a mouse model of hereditary breast cancer - Led by Carman Li www.nature.com/articles/s41...

FINALLY!! Let’s give it a whirl…. AI protein-prediction tool AlphaFold3 is now open source www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Wow!!! IDO1 inhibition rescues LTP in both Tau and AB models of Alzheimers Disease Not my field but a very surprising and exciting result! Beautiful dissection of the phenotype and the biological mechanisms! #neurodegenerativeDeisease #science #drugTargets

Great talk today by Alec Kimmelman today at DFCI - enjoyed learning about the supportive role of tumor innervating neurons in PDAC and the metastatic tumor microenvironment! 🧬

Another giant virus with histones y'all. Medusavirus has them all, and even linker histone (maybe?). Check out our latest preprint by the amazing Chelsea Toner and @nhoitsma.bsky.social biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Super interesting!! 🧬 Epigenetic states favored by the organ of residence can influence the function of driver genes in metastatic tumors www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Super cool!!! Cell-proximity labeling in vivo #immunology #systemsbiology 🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The @fda.gov CBER updated their CAR T cell product guidance - enhanced focus on acute toxicities and long term follow up 🧬 #genomicMedicines #drugDevelopment #biotech

No well-dressed penguins allowed!

Highlighting the importance of use of informative initialization in low-dimensional projection of single cell seq data, Kobak and Linderman explain why Laplacian eigenmaps should be default behavior of both UMAP and t-SNE. Great quick read! 🧬 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Funny to see this article about negative consequences of excess leucine in high protein diets www.nature.com/articles/s42... come out on the same day I woke up to an @npr.org story about the importance of getting enough protein in one’s diet www.npr.org/sections/hea...

Excited to join the vibrant #MolecularBiology & #Genomics community here! I'm Aidan, a postdoc studying cancer epigenomics 🧬 Looking forward to sharing ideas, discussing discoveries, and connecting with fellow enthusiasts! #HiSciSky