Team led by Tomoya Kitajima designed protein-based artificial #kinetochores to act as decoys to reduce bipolar microtubule pulling forces on chromosomes in aged mouse #oocytes, preventing premature #ChromosomeSegregation during meiosis I & II. In @natcellbio.nature.com 👇 doi.org/10.1038/s415...

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

Want to understand how entire fungal chromosomes can be horizontally transferred? Join us to unravel the mechanism/consequences of horizontal chromosome transfer in a fungal pathogen as part of an ERC-funded project. Postdoc/PhD positions available. fungal-evolutionary-genetics.de/open-positio...

Lost Science is a new NYT series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding. You can send your story to the Times here www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/c...

Beaucoup de mauvaises nouvelles, célébrons les bonnes ! Le programme EVARS en absolument génial ! Apprendre aux enfants le consentement ("est-ce que je peux te prendre dans mes bras pour te consoler?"), pour diminuer les risques d'abus d'enfants = impératif !! www.education.gouv.fr/sites/defaul...

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

1st desk rejection ! I am very proud of this paper and will persist nevertheless, Wish me luck (and share the paper widely ! Yes, I am doing shameless self-promotion) ! 💪

Nature research paper: Holliday junction–ZMM protein feedback enables meiotic crossover assurance go.nature.com/42JHXnV

Wow this is quite amazing - I know almost nothing on recombination, but always assumed that the more similar the sequences were, the more likely they would recombine, turns out it's the opposite!

This is the work of a tremendous PhD student, Benoit Madec, who did everything in this study (genetics, molecular biology, all the bioinformatics analyses) He defended his PhD on Monday and is now Dr Madec! I am very proud of him and all the work he has accomplished!

🚨 First pre-print from my team !! TL;DR: presence of polymorphism (sequence differences between the homologous chromosomes) can *increase* the local rate of recombination in Arabidopsis thaliana, turning cold regions of the genome hot (purple v. grey) !

Paper submitted! Not rejected yet!! Celebration is required 🥳 Thread will come as soon as it appears on BioRxiv 🥂

Congratulations @heidiserra.bsky.social for your @cnrs.fr Bronze Medal !!! www.insb.cnrs.fr/fr/personne/... So proud to have such a badass friend and colleague ! #meiosis4ever

One thing to emphasize strongly is that funding to science is like oxygen to the brain. Temporarily restricting oxygen flow for ten minutes (while you figure your shit out) is going to have the same outcome as shutting oxygen off permanently. We are close to the ten minute mark.

Je reprends la métaphore de Robin Jamet : mobilisons-nous pour le Palais de la découverte et faisons-en le panda de la CSTI, l'espèce emblématique qui attire l'attention sur l'état d'un écosystème et amène à le préserver. 🐼

Excited to share our new paper in @cellreports.bsky.social that reshapes our understanding of chromosome organization's deep evolutionary roots! Our work dives into the origins of the machinery that structures our very genomes. 🔗: doi.org/10.1016/j.ce... #Genomics #Evolution #CellBiology #LECA

We’re here for the EMBO meiosis 2025 in Engelberg! Very nice venue, thank you Kirsten Bomblies and Marinela Dukic for organizing!

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬 Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

Rappel parce qu’apparemment c’est pas intégré par tout le monde : Les variétés issue de mutagenèse aléatoire sont bien des OGM (décision de la CJUE en 2018) mais elles sont exemptées de régulation. Ainsi elles sont exemptées de mesures de traçabilité et d’évaluation des risques !

Look at that red nucleus stretching like CRAZY ! Who knew nuclei could do that ! DNA stretching, sure, but what about the nuclear membrane ?! (scale bar 10µm !) The longest measured nucleus reached 71µm !!

Man comes to the US from Lebanon. Starts out delivering pizzas, becomes a Nobel winning neuroscientist. Trump freezes his funding, he gets an email from China offering to move his lab “any city, any university I want" with guaranteed funding for 20 years. What are we doing?

This is a rupture, there will be a before and an after. There is no reason to believe the after will resemble the before, at all. This is a demarcation in the lives of thousands of researchers and tens of thousands of educators.

A three year postdoctoral position is available in my group, investigating plant centromere structure, function and evolution @camplantsci.bsky.social www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/51488/

Les gnocchi rôtis de @owiowifouettemoi.bsky.social c’est l’invention géniale

What a joy it was! Thank you to @namekawasatoshi.bsky.social and @cohenlab.bsky.social for their HUGE help organizing this meeting !! The French crew will organize next year's meeting as well, but will hand over the reins to another #Meiosis4ever community for 2027 !

These are VERY rough estimates, but here's life expectancy after diagnosis of type-I diabetes over the past 150 years. It was Banting and Best's discovery of how to isolate insulin in 1921 — not some fucking cooking class — that gave people including my daughter a new lease on life.

Second Triathlon S done! Very happy about my time (2h05, 750m swim, 23km bike, 5km run).

too cynical?

Nous recevrons prochainement John Tolan, investigateur principal du projet « Le Coran européen », pour parler des découvertes de cette recherche, au moment où une polémique désolante le vise, et à laquelle il répond longuement dans le texte ci-joint.

Pleased to share a new preprint - a great collaboration with @jessicaandreani.bsky.social and the Guerois lab at I2BC, and the Radicella lab at the CEA. Using stuctural modelling, we reveal & validate a 3 protein complex involved in DNA import during transformation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Défilé de néo-nazis à Paris : il me semble pouvoir recycler ce dessin de l'année dernière, tel quel... Source : www.lemonde.fr/societe/arti...

It's going to be MAYosis !!! Register : meiosis.cornell.edu/mayosis2025/... We have it all : meiotic drive, recombination, adaptation, pairing, segregation, interference, resection, crossover landscape, chromosome axis, synaptonemal complex, chromosome dynamics ! #Meiosis4ever

Time to catch up on the past week’s news about science and medicine in the US. Whew. 1/10

May is upon us!

One of the best things about science is the ability to speculate, sometimes wildly. As long as you cite evidence and are ready to change your mind if disproved, go for it! 🧪

En grandes pompes c’est en chaussures de clown ?

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

In this review, I write about why it is important to study synaptonemal complex protein evolution and highlight this with a few key examples of conserved features and unique adaptations.

Love this!!! #StandWithHarvard #AcademicSky

Sounds super interesting!

We're disappointed to see Ben Barres's powerful book "The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist" among the ~400 titles removed from the Naval Academy Library. Needless to say, we're proud to have published his book and will keep it — and his memory — alive.

My main PhD work is up! See thread below. I would love to discuss! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Tariffs xkcd.com/3073

May is always a good month (the weather! the 🇫🇷 holidays! 😂) but now with #MAYosis, May is definitely THE best month of the year

Excited to share our new pre-print. Direct, ensemble FRET assays developed by our lab reveal that assembly of Rad51 filaments at stalled replication sites via RPA/Rad51 exchange causes complete & irreversible PCNA unloading. Big implications for interplay between human DNA damage tolerance pathways

42. That is, 42 pages of terminated grants. taggs.hhs.gov/Content/Data...

So happy we finally published this great piece from Antje Keller @antjekeppler.bsky.social and colleagues on the path forward for FAIR bioimage sharing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Vous ne voulez pas d’OGM dans votre assiette Pouvez vous svp m’expliquer pourquoi ? Pour répondre c’est anonyme donc pas de censure Reposts appréciés ngl.link/yannduroc1

Phishing is in the news, so people who attend Gordon Research Conferences should be aware that there's a whole industry of people targeting them. Check out this email that I received today. Do not replay to anything that doesn't come from GRC -dot- org. www.grc.org/_resources/c...

Had an absolute blast in Iceland these past two weeks. Away from all the nastiness of the world. Back to science with a clearer head and purpose.