The era of American scientific leadership is over. Trump killed it. They want to expel international students after four years, no matter what. It seems like putting white supremacists in charge of the federal government is a bad idea. www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Having chaired an NIH review panel, I know how much effort is put into peer review by everyone involved. This piece lays out the current attack on this system amd why it’s bad for American scientific leadership. It’s exceptionally well written and worth the read. It’s also a call to action.

mtDNA deletions cause incurable diseases. Our CRISPR screen found a fix: deleting MTERF1 restores mitochondrial function, not by clearing bad genomes, but by making the healthy ones work harder. Simple Biology! New preprint 👇 @tatakavlashvili.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

A new PAMP, a new innate immunity principle and a new preclinical application. I am so pleased to share our study on STING activation mechanisms in health and disease. Led by the fantastic Stephanie Ragland, follow the link below for a summary of all we learned. www.cell.com/immunity/ful...

Great band covers a great song.

A DNA break-5mC cycle activates transposable elements in Arabidopsis | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

CA leads the nation in scientific advancements & cutting-edge research. White House Office of Management and Budget new proposed rule puts all this in jeopardy & makes way for politically motivated decisions that serve the President over science.   They must rescind this rule immediately.

Nice day for a ride!

really think that if democrats hold any chamber of congress next year that a condition of passing a budget is the removal of russ vought, who has a genuinely tyrannical vision of presidential power and is a focal point of the lawlessness of the trump administration

Tired of AI-generated figures? I asked our talented scientific illustrator Manon Zuurmond to draw some of the instruments and lab equipment we missed in NIH's otherwise fantastic BioArt resource. First batch now available as CC BY. Free for everyone to use in publications: github.com/Center-for-P...

There is an actual living, breathing Republican who is speaking out against the proposed OMB rule to require political appointees to make the decisions on grant funding. Yes, it’s only Susan Collins, who will likely misplace her spine again, but…

I am thrilled to share that UC Berkeley and UCSF have launched a joint initiative in Computational Biomedicine! cdss.berkeley.edu/news/uc-berk... We will soon be recruiting new faculty and postdoctoral fellows. Please repost to help spread the word.

Excellent response from Dr. Bertagnolli to the article from Scott Atlas www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-a...

Brings back some memories. I wrote the title of our paper “A novel base-pairing interaction between U2 and U6 snRNAs suggests a mechanism for the catalytic activation of the spliceosome.” Ira Herskowitz, who was on my thesis committee said I shouldn’t use “suggests” in a title. We left it in!

Nice day for a stroll!

The caption for the photo says ‘Cole Valley’ which is incorrect. It was taken near Buena Vista park in the Haight. And the story isn’t exactly news. SF is famous for its summer fog.. The City Where You’ll Nearly Always Want a Jacket on the Fourth of July www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/w...

The absolute dumbest thing about Scott Atlas’s opinion is that nearly all industry scientists are trained on NIH funds, trainee salaries are a huge part of the NIH budget. Industry doesn’t want NIH cut, their costs would be immense if they had to run biomedical schools on top of drug development.

A High-Confidence Atlas of Protein Methylation Enables AI-Driven Detection of Methylated Peptides https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.01.733993v1

Yep.

New paper! How do RNAs "know" where to go inside a cell? We dug into the sequence elements that route RNAs to the right place. It turns out that, in mammals, they're surprisingly massive (>200 nt), multipartite, and wonderfully complicated. 🧵

Excited to share our new preprint led by Fred and me in collaboration with the archaeal community! We found that the molecular foundation of histone-based chromatin has pre-eukaryotic roots in Asgard archaea. (1/4) #ArchaeaSky www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Hugely important point! Industry takes risks in developing drug candidates and then bringing chosen ones into clinical trials. Academia takes risks in developing students and helping them become more capable of being independent scientists in industry, academia, and other sectors.

Double the NIH budget.

🧪 New from @dataforprogress.org: Federal research grants are awarded on scientific merit judged by panels of scientists and outside experts. Trump has moved to change that. Voters don't approve. www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/7/...

Humans and bacteria share strategies to defend against viruses. We wondered: could they use each other's genes? Yes, both can! Bacteria can use human immune genes to defend against phages AND Human cells can use bacterial genes for viral defense. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Very excited to share our new Nature study! We discovered that replication stress stabilizes CTCF-dependent chromatin loops enclosing stressed nascent DNA, where G9a-mediated heterochromatin protects it from nucleolytic degradation. rdcu.be/frzLg Huge thanks to all our collaborators and co-authors!

A High-Affinity Nanobody Recognizing mNeonGreen Enables Versatile Biochemical, Cellular, and in vivo Applications. by Steffen Frey and team: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NIH likely to award fewer grants as it races to spend 2026 budget | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Nice article from The Scientist about the antibody "problem". www.the-scientist.com/altered-anti... @reeserichardson.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social @jwoodgett.bsky.social @mbonini.bsky.social @bwjones.bsky.social

My first PhD paper is out in Nucleic Acids Research! We describe "Ab-trapping" - an antibody artifact that distorts assays relying on antibody diffusion (microscopy, CUT&Tag, CUT&RUN). The revisions made the story much stronger. Check it out! doi.org/10.1093/nar/...

Very excited for our new paper, now out in @cellcellpress.bsky.social! /🧵 The protein Tau forms intracellular toxic tangles in neurons in Alzheimer’s disease and Tauopathies. Tau pathology slowly spreads from cell-to-cell but the mechanisms are not clear /1 authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

The Kaplan Lab at the University of Pittsburgh has received funds to recruit a postdoctoral fellow to establish a multiplexed assay of variant effect for a disease gene. This relates to our studies on RNA Polymerase II. This project requires experience with human cell lines and genomics 1/

A few days ago I posted about a funny and smart interview Ezra Klein did with writer Gary Sheyngart. They discussed his prescient novel about a pathetic dystopian society where everyone is constantly being officially ranked based on every possible criteria. And then I hear about QED! 👌

Good to be back in the city of my birth. I’m told that one is a UK citizen by birth unless you renounce it. Given the trajectory of US science one has to keep an open mind!

After reading @blekhernia.bsky.social's great blog post on lab AI usage policy (blekhman.substack.com/p/you-need-t...), we made one in lab meeting. Feedback welcome! rilab.ucdavis.edu/ai_expectati...

What’s true for yeast is true for mice. Another win for fundamental science in unicellular model organisms.

Efficient sampling of reads (with replacement). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Two researchers — one in Massachusetts and one in Shanghai — hoped for the same breakthrough: a gene therapy for deaf children. New Chinese investment in science propelled the one who got there first. n.pr/4weVi49

kmerRRR: A k-mer based tool for functional genomics in Repeat Rich Regions https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.21.732238v1

🧪 "science ... is not a partisan argument but an empirical one... The best way to stand [up] for science remains showing that it is curiosity-driven research that led to a better world today, as in the cures that did not exist a generation ago and weather forecasts that save lives and livelihoods."

Public health research at world-class institutions like the NIH is an important public good. Rep. Suzan DelBene, Rep. Lori Trahan and I are leading 122 of our colleagues to oppose the Trump Administration’s efforts to give partisan political appointees final say over health research grants.

“But science is more than its applications” More people need to understand this. The pursuit of fundamentally new principles of how the universe works is what gets me up every day.

Welcome to the resistance (checks notes) Moody's Ratings fixedincome.fidelity.com/ftgw/fi/FINe...

I’m mostly convinced that this is one giant troll. If it is, I’m impressed.

Ten months ago I had never written an op-ed. I believed the work spoke for itself. It doesn't. When the government calls a lifesaving technology unsafe and scientists stay silent, the silence becomes the story. A new @jhu.edu profile on why I stopped staying quiet: hub.jhu.edu/2026/06/24/j...

Thrilling news to share ... details to come over time, but suffice to say I will have a number of open positions to advertise in the months to come! Skål!!

“The whole point of AI tools is that I no longer need to retain information in my biological memory. My biological memory is for other things now. Important things. Like my Netflix password” 😂 inpreparation.substack.com/p/opinion-i-...

“…….integrating imaging, 3D genomics, and gene expression data across cell lines, we estimate that transcriptional activation is mediated by approximately 25-42 nanometer contacts on the seconds timescale. Our results support a transient contact mechanism for E-P-mediated gene activation.”

Happy Father's Day 🖤

Lehman, Kornberg, Berg, Baldwin, Hogness, Davis, Streyer, Kaiser each lectured in the graduate Biochemistry 200 and 201 courses which I took as an undergrad. Quite the lineup!