As we age, our brains change at both the genomic and transcriptomic levels. 🧠✨ In our new Nature @nature.com paper, we map these changes at single-cell resolution in the human prefrontal cortex from infancy to centenarian. Honored to lead the data analysis and be co-first author on this work!

New study led by Joanna Baker shows bigger brains and relatively longer thumbs coevolved in primates. Humans have huge thumbs, but only what our brain size (esp. neocortex) would predict. It’s NOT driven by tool use. A fantastic paper with a huge amount of work, and superb data presentation 🧪🏺👍🧠💀🐒🦧

Pls. share widely Calling all transposon fans & lovers of genetic innovation MOBILE GENOME welcomes you in Heidelberg, Nov. 4–7 2025 → Vibrant & friendly community → Cutting-edge talks from mechanisms to physiology → Plenty of surprises (TEs never stop innovating) submit abstract by July 29

Finally got my personal academia website done. I am glad it looks well-organized for both laptop and phone. Big shout to "Academia Pages" GitHub pages template. tianxiongbb.github.io

Delighted to share our latest work deciphering the landscape of chromatin accessibility and modeling the DNA sequence syntax rules underlying gene regulation during human fetal development! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Read on for more: 🧵 1/16 #GeneReg 🧬🖥️

The new issue is out! 👉 cell.com/cell/current ⁠ In this issue of Cell, Yu et al. capture evolution of KoRV-A transcriptional silencing as the virus transitions from a pathogen to a stable endogenous retrovirus. The cover features an adult koala with a joey. 📷 Credit: Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary

www.nature.com/naturecareer... UBC LSI Job!!

🧪 A paralysed man can stand on his own after receiving an injection of neural stem cells to treat his spinal cord injury https://go.nature.com/4jaZ3RB

New preprint from our lab! Why is not everyone working on Transposons? Loss of H3K9me3 maintenance in human neural progenitor cells leads to transcriptional activation of L1 retrotransposons www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are seeking a new colleague to join us at the Vienna BioCenter, specifically at my beloved home institution, IMBA @imbavienna.bsky.social we value collegiality and a passion for curiosity driven science. Being a great and fun human being also helps!

#TEsky The domesticated transposon protein L1TD1 associates with its ancestor L1 ORF1p to promote LINE-1 retrotransposition doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Super exciting and beautiful new work from the talented @mathithiru.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In the ‘90s, Pelisson et al. found that gypsy retrotransposons in flies can go viral—literally—thanks to an envelope gene. Now, @mayavoichek.bsky.social uncovers a wild new path to retrotransposon infectivity. A fascinating story—see Maya's thread www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.14.642691v2

Working with a team at the University of Queensland, UMass Chan scientists have discovered that a population of koalas has evolved genomic immunity to a retrovirus: direc.to/mDfy #koalas @lubanlab.bsky.social @tianxiong-bear-yu.bsky.social

📄 Update on our preprint about Gene Regulatory Net (GRN) benchmarking 📄 We have included the original and decoupled version of SCENIC+, added a new metric and two more databases. Dictys and SCENIC+ outperformed others, but still performed poorly in causal mechanistic tasks. doi.org/10.1101/2024... 👇

New preprint of my postdoc work! We found a novel group of zinc-finger proteins that rapidly evolved in a lineage-specific manner to repress regulatory activities of transposon-derived sequences through anchoring nucleosomes. #TEsky biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

I am thrilled to share our story online at @cellpress.bsky.social . Big thanks to all authors: Zhiping, Bill, @lubanlab.bsky.social, Keith & bluesky-less! authors.elsevier.com/c/1kjdaL7PXu... How to tame a genome invader? It takes wild koalas 🐨🐨 to learn it. #Retrovirus #koala #piRNA More below 👇