This preprint from Helen Sakharova is one of the coolest things to come out of my lab: “Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice.” Codon choice is a big puzzle in how information is encoded in genomes, and we have a new angle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here."

Smallpox inoculation was practiced throughout the 1700s; George Washington mandated this life-saving measure for the whole Continental Army in 1777. It was supplanted by the first-ever vaccine in 1796, a huge breakthrough supported by government grants in the UK. Just randomly on my mind.

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

My father-in-law, Jack Strominger, and I wrote a letter to the @wsj.com editor about the current threats to science due to Trump's funding freeze. Please repost! www.wsj.com/opinion/scie...

I was stunned by this work from Kathleen Collins' lab (Berkeley) when I heard her present this at a FASEB meeting! What a crazy innovative idea: Adapting the R2 retrotransposon to efficiently insert any custom transgene directly into RIBOSOMAL DNA ARRAYS! 🤯🤯🤯 The applications are endless....

Great work from Gloria Brar’s group on the role of paralogous RNA helicases in the heat shock response. Surprising increase in growth at high temperature and impact of a short motif! Also important implications of the role of biomolecular condensation. Awesome www.cell.com/cell-reports...

New work from the lab! James Stowell led this project showing the importance of multivalency and phospho-regulation in mRNA decay. This has many parallels with other mechanisms in gene expression. biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

1/ Did you know the genome might have hidden protein-coding genes? In the years since the Human Genome Project, research has been tied to a set of 20,000 protein-coding genes. But the ‘dark genome’ has ‘dark proteins’ lurking in plain sight. 🧪 💻 + 🧬 🔎 microproteins www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Exciting work from Jinyoung Kim and Nick Ingolia enabling pooled CRISPRi screens in human cells by barcoded RNA readout. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Spurred on by ribosome profiling and other cool methods, translation elongation has grown into a whole field with new surprises all the time (and new relevance for vaccine mRNAs!). Here’s our latest on why synonymous codons aren’t all the same. (Thread) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Check out our paper and the accompanying perspective by Kuhlman published today in Science about the surprising role of short tandem repeats in regulating eukaryotic transcription! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... A thread (1/11):