I’ve spent a good chunk of my career relying on American science and engineering to keep me alive. Yesterday, RFK Jr. testified at the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. It was sad to see him try to destroy the life’s work of so many American scientists. He shouldn’t be in this job.

Excited to share our latest manuscript, "Exposure accumulation drives age-dependent disease architectures and polygenic risk scores," led by Xilin Jiang: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... I am attempting an explainer thread for the first time here: (I am usually too exhausted to post one)

The startup named Herasightm after the goddess who threw her disabled child off a mountain, seems focused on public outreach using embryo selection for IQ to win over far rightwing pseuds & techbros

Numerous FAQs & think pieces were written promising GWAS participants & the broader public that sociogenomics was focused on education improvement, environmental interventions, and away from the hereditarian past. All quickly betrayed.

It is depressing, but all too predictable, how swiftly we’ve gone from the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium offering reassurances about the uses of behavioural polygenic scores to one of their lead authors marketing embryo selection for IQ

This is what can be achieved today due to longstanding federal support of academic basic science alongside close partnership of universities, private industry and NIH intramural initiatives. An ecosystem worth not just saving but doubling down on! innovativegenomics.org/news/first-p...

1/n 🚨Very excited to share our recent work!🚨 To understand gene regulation across diverse environmental conditions and cellular contexts, we treated a broad array of human cell types with three environmental exposures in vitro. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Remember when you first learned about genetics at school? All those fascinating examples of human traits that are each apparently determined by just a single gene? Time to check in on some of your favourites to see how they’re doing. 🧬🧵🧪 1/n

I keep coming back to this pithy 1854 statement by Abraham Lincoln about “the legitimate object of government,” which the Trump administration is undermining by offloading to individuals tasks, including life or death matters, that are more effectively, efficiently and fairly done collectively.

This framing is their framing, and NYT took the bait. The correct and accurate framing is: “Deep cuts to medical research threatens progress on cancer and heart disease research, costs the economy $80B, and threatens 300,000 jobs across red and blue states”

The website for the NIH Office of Research on Women's Health has nearly been dismantled between yesterday morning and today. Piece by piece throughout the day. What, the new administration will no longer support or tolerate discussion of research affecting the health of >50% of humans? Seriously?!?

Academic workers across the country are organizing to call on our congressional representatives on Thursday, 1/30, at 3pm ET / 12pm PT to demand these restrictions be lifted immediately. There will be a training over zoom at the beginning of the event. Join us! form.jotform.com/250226137228...

Modern GWAS can identify 1000s of significant hits but it can be hard to turn this into biological insight. What key cellular functions link genetic variation to disease? I'm very excited to present our new work combining associations and Perturb-seq to build interpretable causal graphs! A 🧵

Very excited about this new work from our lab! Explainer thread coming soon @minetoota.bsky.social

How population stratification makes environments look like genes. A short 🧵:

First post in the Good Place! Our preprint on cellular behavior analysis in TCR T cells & cancer cell live-cell imaging data is out! This 3-year collaboration led by pd Archit Verma w/ Alex Marson & Julia Carnevale, with segmentation & tracking by @davidvv & team! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A great paper and a great thread! One point that I partcularly liked was this one: "In particular, [GWAS] variants can be trait specific in two ways: they can either affect a trait-specific gene or affect a pleiotropic gene in a context-specific manner."

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...

Why do association studies prioritize trait-specific variants??? A quick thread about the importance of thinking about all traits at once 👇 1/6 (🧪🧬)

Beautiful work led by Maya Arce from Marson lab reveals a fascinating story about rewiring of a critical gene regulatory circuit in different T cell types: T effectors and Tregs www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to share our first foray into (noncoding) rare variant association testing: a probabilistic model that learns functional annotation importance and finds associations missed by existing methods. Anjali did a fantastic job with model assessment and scaling! www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our study is up! Context-specificity galore -- we explore genetic regulation of gene expression across many cell types and temporal states simultaneously in an efficient experimental system + scRNA-seq:

Excited to see our study on genetic regulation in heterogeneous differentiating cultures out in final form! www.cell.com/cell-genomics/fulltext/S2666-979X(24)00330-6