WashU in STL just announced, in a university-wide email, that we will NOT be signing The Compact. This statement, I believe, exists thanks to the tremendous energy generated w/in our community by, among others, the Faculty Senate, the revived AAUP, and student journalists. I'm proud of everybody.

The Meers Lab always follows protocols to the letter except when they don’t 🦁

It feels very apropos to have this announcement preempted by a government shutdown 🥲 but I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for the tireless work of the reviewers and staff of the Office of the Director who saw fit to give us this chance.

This may be the most important paper ever published about NIH funded research. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We published a detailed protocol for our Plate-CUT&Tag method on @protocolsio.bsky.social to accompany our recent preprint (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...) give it a try! Feedback welcome! dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.n2bvjed5wgk5/v1

On our three year lab anniversary (give or take a few days!), I'm proud to share the first original work produced within the Meers Lab: Plate-CUT&Tag! Take a look: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/3

Death, taxes, and "the PI is too inexperienced and requires a senior co-mentor for this student's F31" 🙃

Another paper bluetorial! Today: how does the spatial location of genes influence their function? (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I wrote down some of my thoughts down on the current race to build virtual cell models. Overall, excited and wary about the work ahead. Also, it's my first post to Substack; getting more excited about it as a replacement for X and Blue Sky. srikosuri.substack.com/p/the-elusiv...

Our paper describing the Range Extender element which is required and sufficient for long-range enhancer activation at the Shh locus is now available at @nature.com. Congrats to @gracebower.bsky.social who led the study. Below is a brief summary of the main findings www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/

How do non-coding variants in enhancers lead to disease? Happy to share our recent work, led by @ewholling.bsky.social, in which we discovered that poised chromatin sensitizes enhancers to aberrant activation by non-coding mutations, contributing to disease. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/

What an amazing time to be a biomedical scientist. www.nejm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Thank you @erikaberas.bsky.social for including me in this in depth @planetmoney.bsky.social piece on the mechanics of research funding at universities—I give it a 👍🏻👌👏👨‍🔬 emoji 🙃 www.npr.org/2025/05/28/1...

Thank you @economist.com for this important, well reasoned piece. www.economist.com/leaders/2025...

Good cover @economist.com

With apologies to @jeremymberg.bsky.social, I borrowed directly and heavily from this thread of his to craft my comment on this policy proposal, which I'm posting here for anyone who would like to use it as a template. Please heed Jeremy's exhortation and post a comment by Friday!

Typical of this White House: a non-expert decrying all that’s wrong, using “evidence” that amounts to anecdotes, offering mealy-mouthed “solutions” (wtf is “gold standard science” anyways?) as a pretext to destroy without any strategy to build. www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-st...

My quote of the day My dad used to say: “Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value." Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

Yesterday, the NIH R35 “Outstanding Investigator” grant to fund scientists in my lab studying antibiotic resistance was terminated for reasons not related to the content of the science, or any actions taken by me or members of my lab

ACTION ITEM-----ACTION ITEM Implementation of Schedule F This is what a lot of us have been worried about. This allows for many civil service positions to replaced with political appointees. This could include NIH institute directors and even POs. BUT THERE IS A COMMENT PERIOD... 1/n

Another great piece on how students at WashU are organizing to oppose the threats to biomedical research in this country www.stltoday.com/news/local/e...

So I did this today: banged out a couple hundred words of a pitch while managing lab, sent it to the opinion page editor at the newspaper my parents still somehow get in print, and got back a "yes" in, I absolutely kid you not, under 15 minutes

ATTENTION If you are on a study section that was scheduled to meet, please post or DM me with information regarding: 1. The name of the study section 2. The scheduled date 3. Whether the meeting actually occurred THANK YOU

So it appears that the closely related MRAB study section *did* meet on Feb 6-7, after being posted on the federal register on Jan 13, 24 days prior: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20.... This suggests that the 35 day notice requirement that people have been tossing about might not be accurate?

@jeremymberg.bsky.social confirmed by SRO that NIGMS MRAA SRG scheduled to meet today will be rescheduled to a later date if you're still keeping track of these things

So it sounds like the MRAA Study Section for ESI MIRA may not meet tomorrow as scheduled? Anyone have confirmation of this?

A thread. Things are bad. But we’ve already lost if they smother the passion & joy we have for science. So here’s a proposal: if you’re a biologist in any way impacted by *exasperated wave* & want to chat, drop me an e-mail at myfirst.mylast[at]ucsf.edu. Let’s schedule a 30min chat about [...] (1/n)

Thank you @michelemunz.bsky.social for quoting me for this piece. Incidentally Eric Schmitt made a factually incorrect statement in it: this does NOT mean more money for lifesaving research, it means LESS--this is a CUT to future therapies and cures, full stop. www.stltoday.com/funding-cuts...

Thanks to all of the NIHers and their friends who reached out to me. I am still here (DM me or Signal jeremymberg.78) I still have a very incomplete picture but based on what I have been told, the damage to NIH and to many wonderful people who work(ed) there is/was impossible for me to imagine 1/n

A Senator voting to put one’s most vulnerable constituents at risk of illness and death is a dereliction of duty of the highest order. Here is a list of those whose shameful acts should eternally stain their legacies: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Subscribing for this feat alone even if I never read another article here popular.info/p/breaking-n...

Biopharma companies and CEOs are keeping their heads down at their own peril. They should speak up about what’s happening to the NIH and other science agencies before it’s too late. Silence gives consent. And no one should consent to this.

Bluetorial: Potential impact of “NIH” “plan” regarding indirect costs on institutions

Making intrabodies from antibodies just got easier! Learn how we made 𝟭𝟵 intrabodies to bind and light up peptides and histone modifications in live cells. And thanks to Academia, all sequences are freely available. (video credit: Yuko Sato @YukoSatoT2) (1/15) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I’ve been seething and grieving since yesterday’s Friday Night Massacre of NIH overheads, a seeming bit of bureaucratic trivial that will in fact destroy the US university system if unchecked. But I want to get away from budgets and rate breakdowns and F&A percentages for a moment. Humor me?

Just remember: The NFL was the first American institution to sanction unfettered power for a unitary executive (QB) by systematically dismantling (defensive) checks and balances on its rule, ostensibly with a mandate to please their followers. No surprise that the winners are the same every year 🙃

PREPRINT! Park et al. makes the case that we may be misunderstanding heterochromatin for past 30 years due to ChIP-Seq biases... 1/n

Hi folks, I'm excited to share a whale of a tale (sorry, bad pun), where we engineer snowflake yeast to express sperm whale myoglobin, and explore how oxygen-binding proteins may have helped overcome anatomical limitations to early multicellularity. 🧪 #MEvoSky journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

I roughly calculated the state-level economic impact of withholding NIH grants in terms of jobs lost per day. For Missouri it's 79--that's 553 jobs a week that this drags on. Data: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... How to contact your representatives with this information: www.usa.gov/elected-offi...

You’re saying our president is refusing to meet his financial obligations?

Per an NIH source: “Discussions with colleagues have suggested that if the universities all come together and raise hell about the delays to funding caused by not holding meetings, that might move the needle. From every state. There are well-funded universities in red states that will be impacted.”

Amid concerning times, sharing a bit of positivity: our 1st preprint of 2025 (funded VIA NIH COMMON FUND), heroically led by Marty Yang (@martyyang.bsky.social) w/ huge assist from @genophoria.bsky.social lab. Lots to cover so let’s get this tweetorial started (1/n)! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Today I sent a version of this letter to each of our senators from Missouri. Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, I trust you'll do the right thing.

The future is now and it is confused 🤖❤️

We are happy to share our enhancer scramble story, a strategy to create hundreds of stochastic deletions, inversions, and duplications within mammalian gene regulatory regions and associate these new architectures with gene expression levels 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How to test the functional impact of non-coding variants in vivo? We developed a new method called dual-enSERT, which can quantitatively compare the effects of enhancer variants in live mouse embryos in under two weeks. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/n

🧬 We’re excited to introduce D&D-seq, a single-cell technology that maps DNA:Protein interactions through molecular footprinting. Check it out here: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #Genomics #Epigenetics

Excited to share my postdoc work now on bioRxiv! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... We discovered a non-genetic drug-adapted state that emerges frequently in the the human fungal pathogen Candida albicans. 1/6