The goal of a PhD is not to learn some facts or read a few papers or learn a bunch of techniques. The goal of a PhD is to learn independence, problem solving, how to finish things you start, resilience, & gain the ability to adapt & think creatively. Learning these things is hard.

Just a reminder that August is peak school holidays in the UK, but also more broadly in Europe and in Canada. If you schedule conferences during August you exclude a large proportion of people from these regions who have family obligations.

Asking BlueSky for help: For a review, I am trying to accurately credit the first paper that measured pairwise 3D distances between 2 pieces of DNA on the same chromosome (or cosmid). Is Trask 1989 the first? I know of earlier single-locus papers (1982). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Both bioRxiv Founders came to the US on H-1Bs

Excited to see our story on epigenetic mediated aclimation of plants to fluctuating light patterns out today in doi.org/10.1111/nph..... This work started 6 years ago co-supervised with the amazing @proftlawson.bsky.social and led by the brilliant @robynemm.bsky.social. 1/2

Are you interested in the mechanisms of mRNA regulation in the early embryo and are looking for a great lab to start your PhD? Then check out this amazing opportunity with my outgoing postdoc @lorenzoorts.bsky.social who will start her own lab - I can highly recommend to apply!

portlandpress.com/biochemj/art... PhD student Jacquie Mills has been getting to grips with RNAcapology. She has written this review on everything you wanted to know about m7G cap methylation and more....

Excited to join Bluesky! Looking forward to seeing the cool research everyone posts!

On my way back from the Transcription and Chromatin UK meeting in Manchester. It was a great meeting with lots of cool science discussed! At dinner we were trying to guess where it will be next year - Edinburgh or Birmingham? 😀 @biochemsoc.bsky.social #BiochemEvent

On behalf of @ckadoch.bsky.social and myself, we are pleased to present our upcoming @KeystoneSymposia, #KSEpigenetics26 Epigenetics and Gene Regulation in Health and Disease, March 2-5, in Geneva, Switzerland. keysym.us/KSEpigenetic...

I'm curious if other mid career PIs have considered completely abandoning the trad publication model. We've been making gradual moves towards that end goal. But it's been difficult to completely jump ship for one main reason for me at least. 1/

Very excited to share an excellent review from @teresa-urli.bsky.social, published one week before her PhD defense! We did a deep dive into the fascinating biology of the variant Polycomb complex, PRC1.6 (1/5) journals.plos.org/plosgenetics...

Coming home in the rain, under a grey sky, to sit beside a comforting fire, to moan about weather, work, the government, the youth of today, picking up the paper to moan about that too, while knowing that I wouldn’t choose to live anywhere else. That’s what makes me feel English. Not waving a flag

Delighted to share our review on how those malaria parasites get into our blood cells and how we might stop them. rdcu.be/eGnUl

The BUB1 and BUBR1 paralogs scaffold the kinetochore fibrous corona | Science Advances www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Congratulations @vcmentowski.bsky.social for solving a remarkably challenging molecular puzzle

New MPhil course starting @UniversityofCambridge. Exciting opportunity for Translational Medical Research in 🔬 Translational immunology 🌍 Pandemic preparedness ❤️ Cardiovascular and respiratory biomedical research 🏥 Acute and emergency care Apply here www.med.cam.ac.uk/study/mphil-...

Honoured to be in Birmingham to mark Bryan Turner’s retirement- a gentleman and giant of epigenetics.

Thrilled to share our story in its final form! nature.com/articles/s41... 💥 After ~10 years, we show that BMAL1 represses transposons via chromatin regulation in embryonic stem cells—rather than circadian rhythms as in adult tissues.

Just one more week left to get an application in! Starting my lab at the Perutz and the @viennabiocenter.bsky.social has been a fantastic opportunity that shaped me as a scientist!

Delighted to share our lab's first preprint identifying DDIAS as a mitotic DNA repair protein. Great collaboration with the @andrewblackford.bsky.social, @tcr-miller.bsky.social and @profstewartlab.bsky.social labs, and many more. Read the paper here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Double celebration on our floor @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social with @guifengwei.bsky.social from the Brockdorff lab and Dounia and Sherry from Fisher lab having their papers published today! And I hear there is more to come... www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Well, we survived our ERC Synergy interview. So exciting working with this great GeneMotors team of SMC experts @ceesdekker.bsky.social Benjamin Rowland, Leonid Mirny. Here's hoping we can continue working together for the next 6 years.

We are hiring-join us!

I want to start a new global movement: Meetless Monday - we encourages people to reduce their meeting activity by one day each week for personal health and the planet's well-being.

Congratulations Miguel!

Thank you for this honor and the continued trust in our group's research! We hope that our work will honor the memory and legacy of Anne and Max Tanenbaum. It is truly a privilege to be part of the amazing communities of @uoftmedicine.bsky.social and @sinaihealth.bsky.social.

Handsup 🙌, who is coming to @blizardinstitute.bsky.social to attend the @illingworth-lab.bsky.social seminar this Friday on "polycomb repression in development and disease"? Also, who is joining online for this @qmulepigenetics.bsky.social seminar.

While journal publishing has always been deeply problematic, hurting both the pace and trajectory of science, something is happening in this moment that is finally causing the system to crumble under its own weight and cost. 1/

Please re-post: Interested in chromatin and its evolution? Good news! There's still time to join us in beautiful Catalonia (9-12 Dec) to discuss eukaryotic, bacterial, archaeal, and viral chromatin and how it all hangs together meetings.embo.org/event/24-evo... Abstract deadline: 30 September

Become our colleague at @fmiscience.bsky.social! The FMI is a very special place to start your lab: a vibrant international institute with world-class research groups and facilities, core funding, fantastic trainees, great colleagues😅, and a collegial culture. Get in touch if you're interested!

It’s Friday and it’s my birthday and I’m waiting for “Decisions” on three papers - will I get a birthday rejection, or maybe a birthday “minor revisions”? Who cares! 🥂

Our Wadjet-II paper by @roisnehamelinf.bsky.social is out in polished form: www.cell.com/structure/fu... With a great preview by @kevincorbett.bsky.social & @amardeeep.bsky.social highlighting the potential of Wadjets: Wadjet—Keeping a watchful eye on circular DNA. www.cell.com/structure/fu...

Heartfelt gratulations to all awardees and also all other applicants who could not be funded. Your ideas & creativity are the future! PS: Being a panel member is among the most challenging aspects of being a scientist job for me. It will never be perfect, but we try hard ...

Excited and very grateful to announce that I have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant by @erc.europa.eu! 🎉 This is a fantastic opportunity to further build my team at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics (@mpi-ie.bsky.social) exploring new grounds in fundamental research:

We're hiring a tech for a project focused on the impact of genetic background on genetics and evolution. If you like doing lots of microbial evolution experiments and are good at bioinformatics/computation, this might be for you. aprecruit.ucsf.edu/JPF05782

Thrilled to be one of the ERC StG awardees this year! It will allow my team to further delve into the puzzle of what regulates the fate of RNA Polymerase II during early elongation: will it terminate early, or elongate happily ever after?

New ERC Starting Grant for Valentin Flury to investigate the role of epigenetic memory during cell division focusing on epigenome maintenance on sister chromatids. Read all details here: www.ie-freiburg.mpg.de/6057908/2025... Congratulations 🥳, @flurylab.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu #ERCStG

Feeling very fortunate to be awarded a Programme Foundation Award from CRUK @cruk-si.bsky.social This is a new area for the lab & lets us team up with @mariasecrier.bsky.social to tackle a big problem of how different cancers lose control of proliferation

In our IWS1 story, we also visualize the histone reader LEDGF PWWP domain on a transcribed downstream nucleosome. Because the PWWP requires both DNA gyres for binding, it binds to the promoter-distal side of the nucleosome during transcription through the nucleosome.

1/ New preprint alert! In collaboration between the Rosen, Redding, Collepardo-Guevara & Gerlich labs, we uncover a surprising principle of chromosome organisation: electrostatic repulsion positions centromeres at the chromosome surface during mitosis. 🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

You would have enjoyed my latest trip to Hamburg where the driver stopped the bus when somebody watched something without their headphones in and gave a 30sec speech about civic responsibility and the demise of civilisation. Phone was silent thereafter.

Yes it’s the end of the working day & I’m tired-grumpy - but people’s manners have really taken a nose dive. On a bus, one young man has his iPad on so loudly we can all hear the movie he’s watching, the young lady two seats in front has her booted feet up on the seat next to the one she is sat on 😡

Please re-post: If you know (or are!) somebody who might fancy doing a PhD (Oct 2026 start) in my group @oxfordbiochemistry.bsky.social, working on chromatin evolution in prokaryotes (or other things we're interested in), please have a look at www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/supervisors-...

Final version of Bingbing Duan’s main thesis work is out now now in Nature Communications @natureportfolio.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... I’m so pleased with this study that we’ve been working on for so long #epistasis #transcription #geneexpression 1/

Exciting day for @crick.ac.uk today: Edith Heard takes over as Director We're looking forward to this new chapter in the story www.crick.ac.uk/about-us/lea...

Check it out, Chromatin Kids! Chromatin remodeller does stuff to Transcription Factors! Functions where it is seldom seen! Both decreases and increases chromatin accessibility! How cool is that?

Not defending this brazen attempt to cull foreign PhD students but 5 years for a PhD is what we’ve allowed it to become in NA. In the UK, with no courses, mine was 3 years or I ran out of support. Who does it serve to have 5+ year PhDs?

We have lift off!! 🚀 Yesterday was the official opening of EpiC! The DNRF Center for Epigenetic Cell Memory at the Danish Cancer Institute! Our EpiC team with director Anja Groth @groth-anja.bsky.social, were joined by Jesper Fisker, CEO @cancer.dk & Niels Mejlgaar, CEO @dg.dk to celebrate 🎉

Last week, we had the pleasure of welcoming Prof. Syma Khalid. PhD representatives of the IRTG board organised a week of talks & events. Syma shared her expertise in MD simulation, science communication & insights into her own research career. Thank you for such inspiring days! @sykhalid.bsky.social

🧬 Transcription elongation by RNA polymerase II relies on a web of elongation factors. Our new work shows how IWS1 acts as a modular scaffold to stabilize & stimulate elongation. Fantastic work by Della Syau! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...