Meet @troymcdiarmid.bsky.social, an Assistant Professor in UBC's School of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. McDiarmid is focused on bridging neuroscience and bioengineering to understand brain function. At the core of his work is a powerful idea: what if cells could record their own history?

Beautiful work @cxqiu.bsky.social @jshendure.bsky.social and co.!

Stoked to announce that I’m starting a lab as an Assistant Professor in the School of Biomedical Engineering and Centre for Brain Health at UBC! mcdiarmid-lab.sbme.ubc.ca Recruiting at all levels - please share the word! Cheers and happy long weekend all!

New preprint from our lab where we learn some interesting things about the context specificity of TFs in their regulation of gene expression by dissecting MPRA-trained sequence-expression models. Surprising guest appearance from RNA Pol III(!) Thread from 1st author @sambean12.bsky.social 👇

[Plz 📢] A little late to the party, but check out our perspective on how cellular heterogeneity can be your friend😊 or foe😠 in cell therapy manufacturing🧫. Shout out to Yeganeh, Hourieh, Enzo, Ali, Yonatan: www.cell.com/cell-systems... @sbmeubc.bsky.social

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/...

We have significantly improved the protocol for recording CRE activities and orders with ENGRAM. We also designed new plasmids for easier cloning. Great work with @jennynathans.bsky.social, @troymcdiarmid.bsky.social and @jshendure.bsky.social . Happy recording!!

Check out our new protocol paper on molecular recording of transcriptional events in genomic DNA! Super fun pulling this together with @jennynathans.bsky.social @chenomics.bsky.social and @jshendure.bsky.social

Super happy to share our protocol for ENGRAM is out in Nature Protocols! This was fun to write with @chenomics.bsky.social @troymcdiarmid.bsky.social @jshendure.bsky.social. In it we describe how to record CRE identity, activity, and order in mammalian cells.

Together with @ronghuizhu.bsky.social, we are thrilled to present our new perturb-seq study of 22M primary CD4+ T cells, across donors and timepoints – the result of a decade-long collaboration between the Marson @marsonlab.bsky.social and Pritchard @jkpritch.bsky.social labs 🧵 tinyurl.com/gwt2025

Our work developing a parts list of promoters and gRNA scaffolds for mammalian genome engineering and molecular recording is now out @natbiotech.nature.com

🚀 Very excited to share the first major work from my PhD!! We combined MPRA and CRISPRa in excitatory neurons to test and validate cis-regulation therapies for hundreds of haploinsufficient neurodevelopmental disorder genes. 🧬🔬 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Stoked to share our latest work entitled: “Large-scale discovery of neural enhancers for cis-regulation therapies” shorturl.at/H3Qww This is an enormous team effort that I had the honour of spearheading with Nick Page and Florence Chardon. Bluetorial below.

Thrilled to share I’ve started my lab at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine! We focus on mapping cellular trajectories & TF networks in development and Mendelian disorders, exploring new therapies. Join us—postdocs, grads, and scientists welcome! sites.dartmouth.edu/qiulab/

Sometimes I think about how from 1935-1975ish, Bell Labs produced an insane amount of revolutionary science and technology, including 11 Nobel Prizes, the transistor, UNIX, C, the laser, the solar cell, information theory, etc. The secret? Provide scientists with ample, steady, no-strings funding.

Check out MitoScribe in our new preprint led by Linhan Wang: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... It's an analog molecular recorder that uses neutral base edits to the mitochondrial genome to store information about historical signaling in a cell. Single cell resolution at scale (see next post)!

E11 Bio is excited to unveil PRISM technology for mapping brain wiring with simple light microscopes. Today, brain mapping in humans and other mammals is bottlenecked by accurate neuron tracing. PRISM uses molecular ID codes and AI to help neurons trace themselves. Read more: e11.bio/blog/prism

After 10 years of work, a complete telomere-to-telomere gap-free genome for C. elegans finally exists: it has 106 Mb rather than the textbook 100.3 Mb, and up to 366 additional genes. genome.cshlp.org/content/35/8...

I'll never get tired of these. (courtesy of Sebasitan Wittekindt doi.org/10.1101/2025...)

Well don't I feel stupid

New paper from my lab and @jshendure.bsky.social lab! Led by the brilliant @zukailiu.bsky.social and @cxqiu.bsky.social. We tackled how anterior and posterior progenitor cells cooperate to self-organize into an embryonic structure (termed AP-gastruloid). (1/n) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

✨Exciting news: the main story of my PhD is out in Science! Together with Christine Moene @cmoene.bsky.social, we explored what happens when you scramble the genome—revealing how Sox2’s position shapes enhancer activation. 📖 Read the full story here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New preprint from our lab! What can we learn about the properties of gene regulatory elements by CRISPR’ing a random set of accessible sites in human cells? Find out here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 👇 1/

Excited to finally present the lab's latest work in defining candidate causal genetic variants that drive autoimmune diseases and their effects on primary human T cell expression and function! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

SCN2A loss is strongly linked to neurodevelopmental delays and, at times, seizure. In an amazing collaboration with @nadavahituv.bsky.social, led by Serena Tamura, Andrew Nelson, and Perry Spratt, we leveraged CRISPR activator approaches to rescue this loss. rdcu.be/eGU0W

Google and Meta search both report that Cape Breton Island has its own time zone 12 minutes ahead of mainland Nova Scotia time because they are both drawing that information from a Beaverton article I wrote in 2024

CloneSelect published in Nature Biotechnology @natbiotech.nature.com. This retrospective clone isolation method using CRISPR base editors is a powerful tool in broad biology. A history of Soh in the Yachie lab. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

⏰Abstract deadline for the Cascadia Advanced Genomic Technologies Meeting is April 30!⚠️ We're hoping this will be the first of many, catalyzing collaboration and leveraging our regional strength in advanced genomics technologies! See you there! de-boer-lab.github.io/CAGT_meeting/

Published in today's issue! OPEN ACCESS article, FREE massive dataset, FREE code, FREE pre-trained AI/ML model. #OpenScience was a mountain of work to make this happen: check it out if you haven't already 😉

I have been trying to find the time to move away from the polical hellscape we find ourselves in to finish and share a bluetorial about science. This helps me remember what this is all about. Ironically, it is about the treatment of pain.

I think people both within science and outside science don’t fully appreciate the miracle that were the Covid-19 vaccines. How much courage it took to get the sequence out, how much work had already gone into figuring out the best viral antigen and how best to present it. 1/

This was a really fun collaboration with @amarderstein.bsky.social where we explored some of the interesting relationships between context-specific non-coding variant effects, disease, and evolution using deep learning models of chromatin accessibility in the brain and heart.

Beware! AAV libraries prone to length & homology dependent chimerism! Our latest preprint, from the brilliant @jblalanne.bsky.social‬, was a true surprise as related phenomena are textbook for lentivirus (highly relevant to HIV & Perturb-seq) yet to our reading not known for AAV tinyurl.com/5amc562a

Now out in @science.org w/ @jshendure.bsky.social we present 'Genome-shuffle-seq': a method to shuffle mammalian genomes and characterize the impact of structural variants (SVs) with single-cell resolution in one experiment. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Important PSA / technical note for any using AAVs for experiments that rely on linked elements/barcodes (e.g. multiplexed reporters, MPRAs, certain single cell CRISPR screens). In work led by @jblalanne.bsky.social - we saw AAVs unlink/swap barcodes when packaged as a pool - design aware!

This is amazing work, I have no words!! This is inspiring and this is the goal !!! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...