Some (+)ve news to lighten another heavy weekend: our latest preprint (c/o Mattiroli + Ramani labs) is up! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A tour-de-force by 1st authors Bruna Eckhardt & @palindromephd.bsky.social, focusing on chromatin replication. RTs welcome; tweetorial in 3,2...(1/n)

NEW: Hours before a new entry ban is supposed to go into effect, the federal government officially acknowledges for the first time that the restrictions do NOT apply to people who currently have H-1B visas. Link: www.uscis.gov/sites/defaul...

Congratulations Needhi 🍸

Congrats to my friends in the Boettiger lab for this really beautiful live imaging work. A big leap forward in understanding the dynamic side of genome organization. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

PIWI clade Argonautes are essential for transposon silencing. Without them, animals are sterile due to massive transposon activity. But how does piRNA-guided target interaction translate into silencing? PhD student Júlia Portell Montserrat has an intriguing answer www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

My favorite experiment: targeted mutations in Piwi in flies that prevent it from binding Gtsf1/Asterix generate a Piwi protein that is loaded with piRNAs, translocates into the nucleus, but is unable to silence transposons, causing full sterility. A mutation we have been dreaming of for years.

🧬DZIF researchers have discovered that #HIV does not randomly integrate into the genome: the virus follows R-loops as signposts, with the enzyme Aquarius enabling the process. These findings open new avenues for potentially curative treatments. @marinalusic.bsky.social @natmicrobiol.nature.com

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

Excited to share my postdoc work, out on bioRxiv today! Histones package DNA into nucleosomes to form the building blocks of chromatin, but how modular and programmable is this system? 1/9

The Fates

They do know how to 💥 🧨 🎇 🎆 in #Heidelberg

#1 Centromeres are epigenetic loci defined by CENP-A, positioned in unmethylated DNA flanked by highly methylated regions. Our work, published in @natgenet.nature.com in collaboration with @naltemose.bsky.social investigates the role of DNAme at human centromeres www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fantastic opportunity. Vienna rocks!

📅Are you a passionate science communicator with research experience in #devbio or #stemcell biology? Only a couple more days to apply for the Community Manager position at the Node. Deadline: 05 September bit.ly/4m7Fn28

The discussion of this paper is more fun to read than a scifi novel…wild!

The scent of silence! Cool research in Cell @cellpress.bsky.social to brighten up your day🌹. The mystery of why some roses are fragrant and others aren't has an answer. It's called SCREP: a rose-specific gene that evolved from non-coding DNA 16.8 million years ago 👇

🔭 Fishing for the Moon Image Credit & Copyright: Marco Bellelli apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25082...

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... and this!

No brush, no pencil. Just a typewriter. Artist James, using a 1930s Smith Premier typewriter, typed out this painting. #art #printer #unique #typewriter #illustration

Is anyone in continental Europe looking for a lab manager? I have a fabulous candidate - let me know and please RT!

Wow, maybe genomic imprinting as we know it is just the tip of then iceberg. Hopefully this helps usher in a wave of mechanistic studies www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We are excited to share our latest work elucidating the structural basis for how augmin binds to microtubules. Out just now @natcomms.nature.com : www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations to the shared first authors @wuertzmartin.bsky.social and Giulia Tonon. Fantastic collaboration with the Schiebel Lab @zmbh.uni-heidelberg.de‬, @fabiololicato.com @bzh-hd.bsky.social, the Eustermann Lab @embl.org, and @erhardtlab.bsky.social @kit.edu. Thanks to all who contributed!

@kasperdhansen.bsky.social, the cover is now online (and pasted in below).

Our work "Aquarius helicase facilitates HIV-1 integration into R-loop enriched genomic regions" is out @natmicrobiol.nature.com, showing HIV-1 integration into R-loop genomic regions upon their resolution by cellular splicing helicase Aquarius (AQR) of the Intron Binding Complex (IBC)🧵.

Stunning green terebellid aka spaghetti worm- by the amazing Alexander Semenov! #wormwednesday

Today in @nature.com we share our back-to-back stories with Ning Zheng’s lab revealing chemical-genetic convergence between a molecular glue degrader & E3 ligase cancer mutations. 1/5

"The most forward-thinking investigation might be a rear view." This, @nytimes.com, should be pun-ishable!

#TEsky #RNAsky #RNAbiology

What a gem. A wonderful reminder of why we do this.

#medsky🧪 #oncosky #immunosky #Cancerbiology Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play a significant role in both #autoimmunediseases, particularly in women & #cancerdevelopment. They regulate gene expression & cellular processes,

Epigenetics Update - The molecular basis of lamin-specific chromatin interactions go.nature.com/3GRXydB Chiara Lanzuolo (INGM) and Ohad Medalia (University of Zurich) reporting in NSMB #Epigenetics #Chromatin #Lamin --- Gain deeper insights into gene regulation; epigenometech.com

small summer joys

This close-up video of a praying mantis eating a fly is pure insect horror boingboing.net/2025/08/14/t...

A reminder you/your lab can support FlyBase at Cambridge through the following link. Every bit helps. Please share if you yourself can't donate. www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-camb...

Join junior group leaders using #Drosophila to understand development, #CellBiology, #evolution and more at the EMBO Workshop on Molecular and Developmental Biology of Drosophila, 21–27 June 2026 in Kolymbari, Greece. Deadline: 3 November meetings.embo.org/event/26-dro... #EMBOevents #GeneSky 🧪

Temperature in my office at 11am - great reason to spend my day in the fly room (A/C) instead of writing a grant proposal

My team has updated our free database of POSTDOC fellowships. This database contains 286 entries. For each entry, we provide a link, short description, deadline, amount, and eligibility criteria. Download this updated and expanded database here: research.jhu.edu/rdt/funding-...

🍂The 2025 Fall Session of GIIN webinars is here! Join us on the 1st Tuesday of each month at 5 PM CET (Rome) / 11 AM DET (NYC). No pre-registration needed, just click to join via Zoom: uniroma1.zoom.us/j/95149984403 Subscribe here for webinar reminders: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Really beautiful work led by Jessica Leismann in Joan Barau’s lab @imbmainz.bsky.social . If you like elegant mouse genetics, the transposon arms race, and a healthy dose of epigenetics, this one’s for you. www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.... @emboreports.org

Two vaccine candidates using mRNA technology elicit a potent immune response against HIV go.nature.com/4ov7WZI

The discovery of CENP-A, the centromere-specific histone H3 variant turns 40 years! Grant Rowley wrote a wonderful historical piece on the cell cycle control of this fascinating piece of chromatin! Check it out. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our experimental module is the heart of the workshop: 3 platforms, 1 benchmark dataset, and a clear mission — harmonize how we measure modified RNA. Get ready to generate data that shapes the future. #Benchmarking #HRP2025 #RNAmods

Many proteins bind RNA, yet we still don’t know what RNAs most bind because methods map one RBP at a time. In @cp-cell.bsky.social, with the Jovanovic lab, we describe SPIDR – a method for mapping the RNA binding sites of dozens of RBPs in a single experiment. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Hoy en @nature.com dos estudios descubren fuentes de variabilidad genética adicional en genomas humanos con las tecnologías de secuenciación de lecturas largas @nanoporetech.com y @pacbio.bsky.social para describir variantes estructurales que actualizan el Pangenoma www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Timeline cleanse

🧪 Open PhD or Postdoc position 🧪 The project is in collaboration with my new collegue Miha Modic. If you are interesed in RNA modification, centromeres and bioinformatics this is for you! Miha has more positions to fill, infos on his linkedin: linkedin.com/in/miha-modic-9aa8a752.

📢 For all HaloTag lovers💙💚💛❤️💜🩶 we are excited to share that our work, in which we developed a new biotin-HaloTag ligand, is now published in @jcb.org! Full link here: rupress.org/jcb/article-...

Our new non-denaturing nanoscale 3D DNA tracing technology provides single-cell (and sister-chromatid specific!) readout of chromatin structure with 10kb genomic resolution - Check it out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Congratulations to Kai and Oyvind!!