Blog post: Chance favors the (theoretically) prepared mind Data is big, machines are learning, so what good is theory anyway? Isn't most discovery driven by serendipity anyway, with theory mostly a "post-mortem"? I argue that this view discounts the value of theory. open.substack.com/pub/arjunraj...

Blog post: Just quit Quitting projects in science is hard, but we should be doing a lot more of it. open.substack.com/pub/arjunraj...

Excited to share our new preprint from the Klose lab, where we investigate how SET1/MLL complexes shape H3K4me3 and regulate transcription in mouse ES cells. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Updated job posting description for our postdoc recruitment to include interest in immuno-oncology

My lab at UCSF is recruiting postdoc candidates interested in CRISPR synthetic biology and functional genomics approaches to study and engineer tissue injury responses! hsiunglab.org

So awesome to have this great paper from Sam Reffsin and Sara Cherry out! In it, we use retrospective clone tracing to show that there are particular single cell states that are more susceptible to viral infection (both SARS-CoV-2 and flu)! www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

biology is so cool because like every week someone is like "Dr. Smith is coming to campus! She is the world expert in blargyblarg!" And i'm like A) never heard of blargyblarg, B) look it up, it's super important and interesting

(3/n) Do mitotic microcompartments have a transcriptional function? Prior work from @chrishsiung.bsky.social Gerd Blobel discovered 'mitotic transcriptional spiking', where ~half of genes transcriptionally spike in mitosis. We now show that microcompartment dot number and strength predicts spiking

Really excited to share our latest work led by @mattiaubertini.bsky.social and @nesslfy.bsky.social: we report that cohesin loop extrusion creates rare but long-lived encounters between genomic sequences which underlie efficient enhancer-promoter communication. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... A🧵👇

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

What do GWAS and rare variant burden tests discover, and why? Do these studies find the most IMPORTANT genes? If not, how DO they rank genes? Here we present a surprising result: these studies actually test for SPECIFICITY! A 🧵on what this means... (🧪🧬) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint! We solve a mystery you didn't know existed. Mitotic cells lack new transcription but require ongoing translation. Interphase mRNA half life is only 2-4 hrs. So how do cells arrest in mitosis for hours without depleting their transcriptomes? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

EPIGENETIC HULK READY TO SMASH AGAIN! GET IN LOSERS!

#FragileNucleosome seminar happening tomorrow!

Looking forward to sharing our work in the #FragileNucleosome series!

We're still recruiting!

We've successfully recruited one postdoc. We are still looking to recruit one more postdoc especially candidates with wet/dry lab hybrid background in genome regulation and/or interests in functional genomics approaches in novel human tissue biology models.

Excited to share James Jusuf's preprint: By integrating Micro-C with SuperRes Live-Imaging we can calibrate genomics&imaging to perform absolute quantification of looping (e.g. this loop is present 3%) We quantify mESC 36k loops: <loops> are generally rare (2.3%) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happy new year! Our lab (hsiunglab.org) at UCSF is moving forward to next stages in our search for postdoc candidates. The positions are still open -- if interested please apply soon!

A little fun with numbers on this Sunday, showing just how successful DNA really is. First, here's what DNA looks like. I'll draw your attention to the "rise" in DNA, that is, the distance between two basepairs, which is 3.4 Angstroms, also known as 3.4x10^-10 meters...

My lab at UCSF (hsiunglab.org) is looking to recruit multiple postdocs across the spectrum of wet/dry lab interests to contribute to our research in synthetic gene regulation, combinatorial genetics, and tissue biology (including liver biology and immuno-oncology).