The grad student organizers of Colorado's long-running RNA Club have been putting together this event to demystify the PhD application process for the past few years. Pass along to folks applying to grad school this cycle 🍁

This is why we fund scientists to study things like oyster slobber even if you don’t think it sounds important

Fun fact: the Japanese Spider Crab’s Latin name (M. kaempferi) refers to this 17th century Dutchman who “discovered” it in… a restaurant. 🙄

I think the R01 is basically a non-starter at NIGMS now. Data from NIH Reporter for new and competing awards, comparing number of R01s issued relative to R35s (MIRA). This has major ramifications for basic science and basic science investigators that are not yet in the MIRA pool

Every single one of these leaves is a bug.

Please share with anyone who cares about NSF support for graduate students and take 30 seconds to sign and leave a comment. The deadline for the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program is about one month away and literally no one can apply. #NSFGRFP jasonjwilliamsny.github.io/grfp2025/

I have the (dubious) pleasure of serving as the chair of my campus's Academic Senate. This means I have a (sometimes) office on the top floor of the admin building, along with the President, Provost, and VPs. I will share something scandalous with you. This office has a thermostat. AND IT WORKS.

You know things are rough when the AAUP's advice on how to use social media is just "set all your accounts to private."

Heads up: ignore samtools dot org, similarly minimap2 dot com and likely others. It's owned by a known phishing site and while the binaries they offer look valid currently (but note they may be serving us different binaries to others), that could change. Ie: it's not us (Samtools team)! Be warned

My most successful outreach effort by far is the "Friends Don't Let Friends Made Bad Graphs" repository. It has 6.8 bookmarks on GitHub. That's just people with a GitHub account, not counting those who have used it but don't have a GitHub account. github.com/cxli233/Frie...

Sorry, what?

Clearly a ton of work in this. I’m excited to finally have more intuitive plot sizing and a clean way to define in margins.

I love every field's hyperspecific variant of this. (Molecular biology's is moving very small amounts of clear liquids from one tiny container to another.)

Only just found this great resource for shell scripting. github.com/dylanaraps/p...

Updated update I downloaded the data from NIH Reporter too soon. The large end of the month update had not occurred. Here are the results as of this morning. NIH grants management staff have been busy making awards. 1/2

minimap2.com is potentially a phishing site. Please don't use anything from that website. github.com/lh3/minimap2...

Our new pre-print from the Greenberg and Churchman labs shows that activity-dependent modulation of RNA stability is a major, and underappreciated, mechanism of gene regulation in neurons. Tutorial below! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/11)

The GRFP lives!! (due end of October) www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

CDC ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging. “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” a spokesperson said, echoing a line from a recent editorial RFK Jr. wrote

Another impressive dissection of tRNA modification consequences from Sarah Schultz in Ute Kothe's lab. Her work reveals that even though TrmA, TruB, or now DusA KOs show no overt growth phenotypes, modifications they deposit have real impacts on tRNA charging and codon-specific translation.

"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.

I find it insane that anyone thinks scientists are currently in a position to determine whether science is "politicized" or not. "Passengers fleeing Titanic in danger of looking like they are anti-iceberg actitvists."

LOV-BirA, light regulated biotin ligase, engineered by Song-Yi Lee www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

This is on the outside of a building by Grady Memorial Hospital and I can confirm it’s every bit as great in person.

Sure, we all know it depends on the protein. But why some proteins can be pushed to 40%(!) of total protein like here and others are a pain to get adequately expressed probably involves some real fun unsolved mysteries in RNA biology.

Our paper is out in its final form! Back in April 2023, my coauthor Aleks Radakovic, then a PhD student, approached me after a talk in Chicago to ask what I thought an aminoacylated tRNA would look like if we pulled it through a @nanopore. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

me, cursing at Concur: fine I will use the travel wizard spouse, passing by: the wizard magically adds ✨complexity✨

Can we just wait long enough

The original circos plot? From the 1947-1948 Carnegie Yearbook, the page prior to McClintock's Mutable Loci in Maize paper.

These exciting new results therefore have important implications for recoding of the genetic code for synthetic biology purposes and in the use of suppressor tRNAs for premature stop codon readthrough in human diseases. Congrats everyone! rdcu.be/eAcLz

Our new research was just published in Nature Communications! Graduate student Evy Kimbrough, Ha An Nguyen and Jacob Mattingly contributed to this work, Our results directly answer a long-standing and fundamental question in biology of how tRNA modifications influence mRNA reading frame maintenance.

Michael is right to raise concerns about this rule, which seeks to force around half of international students to renew their student visa at least once during the time they’re studying. But the “good” news is that it’ll be a proposed rule, so there will be notice and comment and time to oppose.

We’re growing @arcadiascience.com & are on the lookout for talent to run new pilot projects contributing to our broader goals. Seeking computational + wet lab fluency to iterate independently on new projects. If you’re a creative scientist w/ ambitious ideas, apply! jobs.lever.co/arcadiascien...

Our RAPPL purification of ribosomes and associated material is out. I am really proud of this study in collaboration primary with Pavlovic-Djuranovic lab, as well as Jovanovic and Hashem Labs. This method aims to replace 60 years old purification of ribosomes by sucrose cushions rdcu.be/ezlhg

📢Job Opening! 🧪🖥️🧬👩‍🔬 Ready to hire qualified candidates to map #RNA modifications in human transcriptomes using #nanopore direct sequencing. Dr. Ya-Ming Hou at Thomas Jefferson University houlaboratory.com/research #HigherEd #EDUSky #AcademicSky #STS

apnews.com/article/texa... researcher faces deportation after being held for week at San Francisco airport

I find this intriguing, but then again if our lab had a most rambling person in Slack award I’d win it every year.

Look at this wiggly little guy.

Hiring 4 postdocs — organismal biophysics, soft robotics, frugal Raman diagnostics, or your own bold idea. 3-year funding, $65K+ benefits. GT (Atlanta) now → CU Boulder BioFrontiers Institute in Fall ’26. PDF/details in next post. Tag/share if someone comes to mind. 🧪🪲🪳#livingphysics

I am so incredibly excited to share our latest work, on the exploration of #RNA secondary structure ensembles and discovery of RNA regulatory structural switches in bacteria and human cells, just out in @natbiotech.nature.com: nature.com/articles/s41.... A short tread! (1/n)

“Tae Heung “Will” Kim has lived in the United States since he was 5 and is a green-card holder pursuing his PhD at Texas A&M University, where he is researching a vaccine for Lyme disease, said his attorney, Eric Lee.” 🧪 www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

Can’t wait to introduce bird-based storage into my backup system

New, from an anonymous NIH insider: Trump is being pushed to spend more NIH money. The White House is ordering NIH to do multi-year budgets for awards. This budget trick means fewer awards, fewer labs funded, and lower paylines for researchers. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/alert-the-...

Cool thread, will be interesting to see how controllable this relationship is.

FDA’s cancer review team overseeing breast and gynecological products has lost about 1/3 of its medical review staff and the malignant heme group will lose about 2/3 of its medical review staff—all to voluntary resignations clustered among seasoned reviewers insights.citeline.com/pink-sheet/a...