How are preprints perceived and evaluated in the life sciences from a PI's perspective? Check our my podcast episode through the @asapbio.bsky.social Fellow's program, where I interviewed @leonardomorsut.bsky.social about his perspective on the topic! My key takeaways: 1/6

The Drain of Scientific Publishing details very clearly how for-profit publishers making >30% profit margins have corrupted any solution the research community has attempted. Let's cut ourselves free. Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: bit.ly/StrainQSS Oligopoly: bit.ly/OligSciPub 12/12

Why do we do science? This was my opener for a department roundtable “Reimagining Scientific Evaluation: Are we judging a book by its cover?”, inspired by @asapbio.bsky.social’s Fellows program. Now more than ever, we should strive for an academic culture that’s transparent, efficient, and fair. 1/5

🎉🎉 We finally have a website! 🎉🎉 Did you miss a thread? Want to know who our delegates are? Do you want to join our big club? Check it out: epithelialmechanics.github.io Huge thanks to all thread-contributors and to you for following us!

📣Announcing the 4th edition of the EMBL‑IBEC Conference on “Engineering Multicellular Systems”, taking place 11–13 March 2026 in Barcelona. Exploring organoids, mechanobiology, embryo models, organ-on-chip systems, multiomics and more. Abstracts open now! events.ibecbarcelona.eu/embl-ibec-co...

Finally, someone has solved a real problem with AI! No more having to take a paper in the format for a journal that rejected you, and reformat it for a new journal. Well done!! formatmypaper.com

🚨JOB ALERT Dr. Buceta at @i2sysbio.es welcome applications for 36-month postdocs on: 👉 Mechanical markers of tissue dysfunction due to ageing – digital twins & machine learning Details here: fgcsic.es/convocatoria... 📩 Contact [email protected] to shape your proposal! @epimechfc.bsky.social

A Nobel-winning scientist of great modesty and humour, John Gurdon died on 7 Oct. Not only did he make a discovery that laid the foundations for stem cell research, he also created one of the best environments for research at the Wellcome/CRUK Gurdon Institute wellcome.org/news/sir-joh...

A bold call to challenge the status quo in scientific publishing: «Science advances through disagreement, through competing hypotheses tested against reality. Why should scientific communication be any different? »

New Blog Post: Scholarly Communication Is a Research Problem. This Means You. pracheeac.substack.com/p/scholarly-...

The Jane Goodall Institute of Canada has learned this morning, Wednesday, October 1st, 2025, that Dr. Jane Goodall DBE, UN Messenger of Peace and Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, has passed away due to natural causes. She was in California as part of her speaking tour in the United States.

When I asked my PI @leonardomorsut.bsky.social why he publishes all our lab’s work first as preprints, he said:
“It seemed like the obvious thing to do.” In mammalian synBio, we’re lucky: most of the community uses preprints. Why it matters 👇 1/5

Different cell types are like oil and water - check out my @epimechfc.bsky.social thread on differential adhesion and its potential applications in tissue engineering!

Why am I interested in preprints? For me, they tie directly to two fundamentals of academia: how we share findings and how we evaluate each other. Preprints can accelerate research and support new ways of evaluating scientists—beyond metrics we currently use, like journal impact factor (1,2). 1/4

Collective cell motion has many forms, but rotation is the coolest of them all. I'm @onenimesa.bsky.social , and in this short🧵, I'll highlight some instances of global tissue rotation like this one from @BauschLab

Grateful to @jacoates.bsky.social for leading this year's @asapbio.bsky.social Fellows program! What a great way to build community around shared values in open science. I'm now motivated to keep advocating - stay tuned for resources, reflections & hopes for a better future in academia (and beyond)!

NIH wants to hear from you. No really. Request for Information on Maximizing Research Funds by Limiting Allowable Publishing Costs grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

The "reproducibility crisis" in science constantly makes headlines. Repro efforts are often limited. What if you could assess reproducibility of an entire field? That's what @brunolemaitre.bsky.social et al. have done. Fly immunity is highly replicable & offers lessons for #metascience A 🧵 1/n

Online now @ Cell is the yeast multicellular engineering paper from Fankang Meng - the fruits of his productive PhD in our group. He developed modular synthetic biology tools to bring multicellular behaviours to yeast - specific adhesion, juxtacrine signalling and more. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Exciting Research Professorship Position in Stem Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Leuven. Amazing research ecosystem, great colleagues, high quality of life, tenure track. For those interested in joining us, please see below: www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jo...

Enter our essay competition and win £250. Share with us your ideas on how to innovate event organisation to have a lower environmental impact. Find out how to enter at biologists.com/stories/essa...

From the Editors-in-Chief of all @biologists.bsky.social's journals: "In these uncertain times, we must strengthen our international scientific networks. We must build new bridges of collaboration. We must speak with a unified voice in support of evidence-based policymaking and scientific freedom."

you’re fired. wait you’re rehired. email us a list of things you’ve done today wait forget it you’re fired again. come back your job was important. you’re fired. or hired. come in to the office. wait the office has no computers go home. we are the department of government efficiency.

Most EU organisations post on euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/funding... as well as findaphd.com

Pretty sad. Just got the email that CZI is canceling the second round of Diversity Leadership Awards. Private industry will definitely not fill the hole that NIH and NSF are leaving. 😢💔

The most memorable science travel of my PhD - strongly recommend applying! Great science in a beautiful setting

My feed is overwhelmed with scientists right now calling out the catastrophic consequences of the NIH indirect cost order from last night. If those same people aren't also speaking out against the anti-trans, anti-DEI, anti-immigrant orders...we are lost. The only path forward is solidarity.

The scientific publishing landscape is evolving, arguably for the better, promoting more open access, transparency, and objectivity - bibliographic databases should follow suit and be open to promoting this evolution and exploration of different ways to publish science

Choosing a mentor is arguably one of the most important decisions of any PhD/postdoc, regardless of whether they want to stay in academia or move to industry. My two cents when going through this process: you never ask too many questions (to everyone you can, not just your prospective mentors)

Agree 100%! This should become the norm or even a requirement from funding agencies. Everyone from students to PIs have to gain by sharing their work months to years before final publication. And it gives us the chance to judge the work before introducing the bias of journal names and impact factor!

Delighted to share our last preprint!!! 🎉🎉🎉 biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.11.627621v1 We share the first synthetic gene circuit guiding the self-organization of mammalian tissues in elongating structures by dynamically tuning growth, viscosity and adhesion.

Agree 100%! Especially as trainees, there are so many unpredictable factors when choosing a lab, a mentor, and a project. We are particularily vulnerable to luck as our time in the lab is limited, so our ability to hedge our bets by having several projects running in parallel is limited.

What a final for 2024 for mammalian synBio! Two groundbreaking papers develop new synthetic receptors to detect synthetic or natural soluble ligands & respond in various user-defined ways. Both dive deep into how their system works and provide many examples of applications. Let’s take a peek:

Please share! Here is a starter pack dedicated to Mammalian SynBio! It is still incomplete so if you would like to be added/removed please let me know! go.bsky.app/SsxHKoV

Applications open for a new cohort of @dev-journal.bsky.social *Pathway to Independence* fellows Know a #devbio post-doc about to enter the academic job market? Would they benefit from a little support & mentoring? Spread the word Deadline 31 Jan 2025 journals.biologists.com/dev/pages/pi...

Please check out this upcoming Gordon Conference (GRC) on Developmental Biology - March 2025 Very diverse and relevant topics! and Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) accompanying it as well ! (speaker list in commentts) www.grc.org/developmenta...

Check out our lab's latest publication - cells that make waves! We also tell a cautionary tale for those trying to engineer tissues with synthetic gene circuits: tissue physics, such as cellular crowding, may affect circuit behaviour #NotInTheGenes. See Jos's summary for details. More to come soon!

On to Part 2 of the Synthetic Biology (SynBio) starter pack. Part 1: bsky.app/starter-pack... Part 2: bsky.app/starter-pack... Reply or DM to add/nominate.

I am thrilled to share that our work is finally published in Nature Communications!!! 🎉 🎉 🎉 I had the honor of leading the project to its finish line during my last years at USC, building on the groundbreaking work of my co-first authors Pranav Bhamidipati and Marco Santorelli. (1/n)