Australia’s hyper-competitive grant system is harming the very researchers working to improve our nation’s health. Chronic stress, relationship breakdowns, depression, burnout, self-medication, and, tragically, suicide are part of our sector's reality. www.linkedin.com/posts/alforr...

Chances are you're about to lose. Science funding in Australia is now a gamble with terrible odds. #NHMRC Ideas success rates have hit 8.1% nationally, <4% in WA. Brilliant colleagues are leaving or quitting. We need change. www.linkedin.com/posts/alforr...

Australia: Low ARC success rates for early career researchers sparks anger (free to read): www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-aust...

Chelsea Mayoh at #abacbs2025: "If you're not using RNA-seq in your precision medicine program you're probably missing stuff"! Great to see @aliciao.bsky.social lab tools MINTIE, ALLsorts and TALLsorts making an appearance 🎉

It's time... theconversation.com/how-the-war-...

When I took this job as the Head of a department, I never thought my job would involve consoling & moving on some of my most talented researchers at the end of each year - just bc their ARC/NHMRC grant didn’t get up. Having worked in multiple countries, I have never seen this normalised like in Aus.

The success rate for NHMRC Ideas Grants announced yesterday was just over 8%. That means 11 of every 12 people who applied got rejected. This is a culture changing level of rejection and frankly a point of national shame. This is a crisis for research. I will not rest until we see this resolved.

Be kind to each other.. bad news for most coming in under embargo. We need more funding in the system...

Heading to Radelaide for #ABACBS2025 . Looking forward to catch up with old friends and nerd out on bioinformatics! Checkout PhD student Peiwen Liu's poster on connectomeDB2025 (Quality matters!) connectomeDB.org

connectomeDB2025: Quality matters! ✅3,579 ligand-receptor pairs supported by 2,803 papers ✅14 vertebrates ❌ >2,900 unsupported pairs from other DBs excluded connectomedb.org academic.oup.com/nar/advance-... @JARamilowski @sakura_maezono @rui_hou_ @weitao_lin @yen_yeow + team

The ARC has “announced” an update on the proposed changes to its grant schemes. Key changes, in response to “nearly 350” submissions” (!) on their proposal, are 👇 More here: www.arc.gov.au/news-publica...

The ARC Board has proposed a major shake-up of the National Competitive Grants Program ▶️ www.arc.gov.au/engage-us/co... I've only skimmed so far, but they propose reducing 13 grant schemes to 6, with intent & scope in the table👇 Submissions are being accepted in response until 13 April. Get to it!

Prohormone cleavage prediction uncovers a non-incretin anti-obesity peptide . www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do you have an exciting story about #enhancers or #enhanceropathies?. Then submit your abstract to the @embo.org workshop on "Enhancer mechanics and Enhanceropathies" in Denmark before is too late: the deadline for abstract submissions is in two weeks (March 17th)! meetings.embo.org/event/25-enh...

Heading to #lornegenome25 #LorneCancerConference ? Looking for a computational postdoc to work on spatial and single nuclei transcriptomics of poor prognosis cancers, please DM me or see me at Lorne. We will be advertising soon. @ozsinglecell.bsky.social #LorneCancer2025 #Lorne2025

@ozsinglecell.bsky.social #OzSingleCell25 has a new website www.ozsinglecell.com See the current list of invited speakers and stay tuned for registration details. Sponsors reach out to [email protected]

MagLOV! MagLOV is a fluorescent protein you can "turn off" with a handheld magnet, engineered by @mariaingaramo.bsky.social. We think/hope we can use it to turn arbitrary proteins (including drugs!) on and off in opaque creatures (including humans!). bsky.app/profile/addg...

A little video intro into Illumina Single Cell 3' RNA Prep protocols. It has begun!! #singlecell #transcriptomics #PIPSeq #illumina

Out today in @naturegenet.bsky.social -- PERFF-seq! With @tsionabay.bsky.social , @ronanchaligne.bsky.social, Bob Stickels, Meril Takizawa, + Ansu Satpathy, we describe this new assay to study rare populations with programmable nucleic acid cytometry. 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@nature.com wants to hear from you on the battle of David vs Goliath - aka Twitter 🐥 vs Bluesky 🦋* And if you’re reading this post I already know your answer to one of the questions 🙂‍↕️ 👉🏼 www.nature.com/articles/d41... *I’ll let you decide who’s who at this point!

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Perturb-map - focused on receptor/ligands hypothesized to be involved in tumor-macrophage communication

I've been catching up on some reading and came across this paper. Ovarian cancers export a cancer-specific #lncRNA, Tu-stroma, to TME via exosomes. Tu-stroma alters spicing of flower gene in stromal cells to reduce cell fitness. Such a cool mechanism.

Sridevi Challa, Lee Kraus et al. discover a druggable PARP14/TARG1-regulated pathway that mediates site-specific mono(ADP-ribosyl)ation of the ribosomal protein RACK1 & modulates the growth of ovarian #cancer cells. https://buff.ly/3DOejo4

AI-driven ultrasound detection of ovarian cancer. #NatureMedicine "AI model ROC curve and human examiner performance" Open Access www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very excited to announce that the single cell/nuc. RNA/ATAC/multi-ome resource from ENCODE4 is now officially public. This includes raw data, processed data, annotations and pseudobulk products. Covers many human & mouse tissues. 1/ www.encodeproject.org/single-cell/...

We are here 🦋. Save the date for Oz Single Cell 2025, 23-25 May in Sydney

Wow head-to-head comparison Visium HD FFPE, CosMx 6K, Xenium 5K, Stereo-seq v1.3 and Visium HD FF profiling on HGSOC and HCC. Heads-up @GESTALT_sp hopefully can save community some $$$$

Our paper with @NCARD_research is finally out. Finds • Circulating CD8+ TEMs are more abundant in chemoimmunotherapy responders • Stem-like CD8+ TEM expansion links to permissive pre-treatment tumour environment cell.com/cell-reports... #mesothelioma

Another terrible year for #NHMRC Ideas grants in WA. Only 6 of 127 submissions funded. National rate was 10.1%. If this was an equitable funding scheme WA should have got 12 or 13. Multiple category 6 grants missed out. This means 6 or 7 of the best research groups in WA give up.

I need a volunteer..

Is biorxiv down/slow today?

I never tire of seeing these progressively improved pediatric ALL survival curves, which represent one of the most remarkable achievements in all of medicine. Amazing to see even more improvement with bispecific antibody #immunotherapy presented in the #ASH24 Plenary session. #hematology #leukemia

Major milestone: Tabula Sapiens 2.0 maps tissue composition & TF expression in 175 cell types, identifying 745 ubiquitous & 890 cell type-specific TFs (many still uncharacterized -> #Codebook) w/ roles in tissue homeostasis, stress response & metabolism. #SingleCell www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

El otro día, un guionista en edad de jubilarse me contó que su mujer le había reñido: “Siempre igual, con mil proyectos a la vez, y diciendo que vas a aflojar cuando no te lo crees ni tú”. Sentí vértigo: ¿serán así mis próximos 25 años? Con suerte. Si alguien encuentra un equilibrio, que avise.

In Hong Kong for #HCAAsia 2024. Looking forward to catching up with colleagues and discussing collaborations in the region.

NHMRC Ideas grants are out under embargo. Congrats to those who got theirs.

Great story www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Australia New Zealand Gynaecological Oncology Group, #ANZGOG, Annual Scientific Meeting will be held in Canberra, Australia, March 5-7, 2025. Abstracts currently due by Dec 2nd. www.anzgogasm.org.au #GynaecologicalCancer #OvarianCancer #EndometrialCancer #BasicScience #ClinicalTrials

1/ Introducing SCimilarity, a new foundation model to explore single-cell RNA-seq data across tissues and diseases! It learns a common measure of cell similarity by training a deep metric learning model on millions of cells from various human tissues and conditions. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Open-rank tenure track positions in computational biology! Come work with a gaggle of great colleagues in the CMSE department at Michigan State! #msu #cmse #compbio #bioinformatics #genomics #BioSky careers.msu.edu/cw/en-us/job...

Encouraging data for a neoantigen vaccine vs triple-negative breast cancer, revving up the immune system with favorable outcomes compared with historic controls (Phase 1 trial) genomemedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Comprehensive benchmarking of tools for nanopore-based detection of DNA methylation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.09.622763v1

One enhancer can activate two endogenous genes simultaneously and across a TAD Boundary. Check out our new preprint. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Repurposing large-format microarrays for scalable spatial transcriptomics #spatial #newtech www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Spatially Resolved in vivo CRISPR Screen Sequencing via Perturb-DBiT https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.18.624106v1

We ask students to write a research proposal, but we should also teach them about how the project will likely actually unfold.

My first post on Blue Sky - moving over ! For all post-docs out there - fantastic opportunity @EMBL. Independent group leader position: Core funding, state-of-the-art core facilities, access to fantastic Ph.D. students, and of course amazing colleagues. Please apply www.embl.org/jobs/positio...

Not very convinced, only paired with spatial data it "starts" to make sense but it's still a long shot. In this work doi.org/10.1038/s415... we filtered inferred communications based on spatial proximity and could validate some novel interactions in multiple sclerosis (Figure 4).

This is funny www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

More evidence of immune cell (macrophage) -> stromal cell (fibroblast) inflammatory communication to alter organ function (deleteriously, in this case) #ImmunoSky www.nature.com/artic...