Our paper is now out in Nature: “Ancient co-option of LTR retrotransposons as yeast centromeres” www.nature.com/articles/s41... A short thread on how retrotransposons helped give rise to yeast point centromeres. 1/14

Why are some males caring toward infants while others are neglectful or abusive? I'm so pleased to share work that my colleagues and I @princeton.edu have just published @nature.com (an explanatory thread to follow!) (1/8)

It's easy to be concerned about vaccines when you stop being concerned about viruses. You can only stop being concerned about viruses in a world with vaccines.

How could a simple self-replicating system emerge at the origins of life? RNA polymerase ribozymes can replicate RNA, but existing ones are so large that their self-replication seems impossible. Could they be smaller? Excited to share our latest work in @science.org on a new small polymerase. 1/n

Interested in transcriptional regulation, enhancers and 3D genome folding? In this new study we wondered about the role of cohesin loading at enhancers for long-range transcriptional control www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... detailed 🧵👇

Jayapal asks Epstein survivors in hearing room to stand and raise hands if they still haven't been able to meet with Bondi's DOJ. Every single one of them doe. Jayapal then gives Bondi an opportunity to apologize. She responds by trying to attack Jayapal and Merrick Garland but doesn't apologize.

👇👇👇👇

Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine (IsoDDE), a unified computational drug-design system Announcement: www.isomorphiclabs.com/articles/the... Report: storage.googleapis.com/isomorphicla...

At this point we have to assume this administration is unlikely to approve any new mRNA interventions and will be extremely resistant to approving any new vaccines. Sabotaging our national health and medical science.

If this ends up being due to some AI screening for banned words (even in different contexts), that would be absolutely shameful. I know program officers are strapped, but the community needs clarity on what happened here from NSF directly. The integrity of the entire proposal system is compromised.

So serious question, how do you read *submitted, copy available upon request? I ask because sometimes manuscripts exist & are undergoing peer review, but are not published as a preprint for reasons that might be out of the applicant’s control.

Dawg are you fucking kidding me bsky.app/profile/horm...

Holy shit: it's an RFP for the NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology (PRFB). Hello old friend www.nsf.gov/funding/oppo...

"There is still life in the old dog." Brian Charlesworth on Fisher's Fundamental Theorem in @journal-evo.bsky.social doi.org/10.1093/evol...

Our new paper: Entropy Sorting Feature Selection (ESFS) A computational framework for gene selection from single cell data that extracts biological signals in noisy data while avoiding artefacts from conventional dimensionality reduction A thread www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

European Scientists who said NO to Epstein-funding are the heroines of this hour🦸‍♀️ They show: It was your choice to SAY NO to Epstein's $ as scientist- you just had to have ethics & a spine Kudos to Physicist IVETTE FUENTES who said NO She was working at @quantumunivie.bsky.social @univie.ac.at

Thrilled to see our revised preprint now published in Nature Ecology & Evolution! If you’re curious about how to build a bat wing by re-using existing gene programs, check out the link or the tutorial below. Big congratulations to all co-authors!! Thanks to reviewers! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you are a student whose NSF GRFP application was returned without review for vague 'eligibility' reasons: 1) Let your department chair & Graduate School know. Encourage them to contact NSF & congress 2) Write to your congressional reps. 3) Write to [email protected] to request re-consideration;

I'm hearing from multiple people that students who submitted ecology GRFP proposals are having those proposals rejected without review, despite ecology being listed as an eligible field. If this is a programmatic change, this is devastating. Ecology is the study of Earth's life support systems.

We are thrilled that our study on the evolution of gene regulation in mammalian cerebellum development – led by @ioansarr.bsky.social, @marisepp.bsky.social and @tyamadat.bsky.social, in collaboration with @steinaerts.bsky.social – is now out in @ScienceMagazine! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Please if you know of others being returned without review let us know! No clear pattern that I can tell. Fwiw my student sent an appeal to email listed in rejection message and got a (form) response that their app was being further evaluated.

A number of our students got the following comment back on a rejection for the NSF GFRP. They are in an eligible STEM field. Is this something people in other places are getting too? Is it a quirk or targeted?

AlphaGenome is out in @nature.com today along with model weights! 🧬 📄 Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 💻 Weights: github.com/google-deepm... Getting here wasn’t a straight path. We discussed the story behind the model, paper & API in the following roundtable: youtu.be/V8lhUqKqzUc

Grad student in lab just had their GRFP returned without review. But their proposal is not on ag/crops/health. What gives?? 😡

Moderna have announced that they won't run new phase three trials now with massive impacts for new vaccine development- why- its because of RFK Jr and his anti-vaccine campaigns and cancelling mRNA vaccine research which affect the sales the company can then make 🧪🧵 #PublicHealth

How and when did domestic cats conquer the world? 🐈 The aDNA study recently published in Science tells a fascinating story about the human-mediated dispersal of our purring furry friends. doi.org/10.1126/scie... #MetagenomicsMonday #SPAAM #aDNA #paleogenomics #cats #zooarcheology #domestication

Have you wondered how the rules of chromatin folding have evolved? Well, this task is not easy to formalize. But here is our take on it: train species-specific DNA-to-chromatin encoder, apply to DNA of unseen species, and build chromatin rules-based tree of life. Have a look: doi.org/10.1093/nar/...

One of the best things I’ve read in a while:

The Senate may choose to vote together on the DHS and LHHS bills. Thus, a filibuster on DHS may mean no funding for NIH. What my colleagues are saying: “Shut it down, public health will understand. I’ll work without pay again.” - anonymous NIHer

We are not the first people, or the first country, to suffer under a tyrannical government that does not respect our lives, or our rights. There is a method for how to effectively resist, and eventually topple, such a regime. We can learn from others who came before us. This is my favorite guide.

Nonviolence is, in fact, working. This administration is weaker than it was a year ago. More and more of the public is becoming galvanized against it; its agents are being impeded.

One of my neighbors was murdered in the streets today by ICE agents motivated by this sort of race science propaganda.

We are recruiting a Postdoc in computational biology, together with @mariasecrier.bsky.social 4yr, fully funded by @cancerresearchuk.org, ideal for Postdocs wanting to develop their independence Applications open now: www.imperial.ac.uk/jobs/search-...

Trump has been in office for one year. We at @nature.com did a deep dive looking at the administration's disruption of science in numbers. Take a look—the numbers are staggering. By me, @dangaristo.bsky.social, Jeff Tollefson, @kimay.bsky.social, & help from @noamross.net @scott-delaney.bsky.social

Excited to share our latest work in @ajhgnews.bsky.social 🧬📄 We mapped the regulatory landscape of human liver at single-nucleus resolution using snMultiome, connecting genetic variants to the cell-type mechanisms underlying cardiometabolic disease. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

There is a special Current Opinion in Genetics & Development issue about genome architecture and expression and it looks great including reviews by @lennarthilbert.bsky.social @yghavi.bsky.social and @wbickmor.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

New preprint! and my first single-author paper, so bear with me. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Malaria population genetic studies have found some puzzling patterns: Ne estimates spanning orders of magnitude, genome-wide negative Tajima's D, and over a quarter of genes with πN/πS >1 1/n

It's easier to tear down than build up, and in science we have a bad case of that. So: how to lead a journal club that actually finds value in what you read. scientistseessquirre... 🧪

still one of the best explanations of principal component analysis (pca), explained at different levels from layman to the more math inclined stats.stackexchange.com/a/140579/132...

Tracing the evolutionary histories of ultra-rare variants using variational dating of large ancestral recombination graphs https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.07.698223v1

@science.org Deep contrastive learning enables genome-wide virtual screening | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

if you want a long read that involves udders, a hot air balloon, and some extremely dubious data on egg prices, the story I’ve been working on for the last few months where I tried to single-handedly take on every government function myself is now online! www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Join @stirlingchurchman.bsky.social, @moffittlab.bsky.social, @saramostafavi.bsky.social, me and all speakers for the 2026 CSHL meeting Systems Biology: Global Regulation of Gene Expression, March 11-14. Abstract deadline January 9! More infos and registration at meetings.cshl.edu/meetings.asp...

Our paper on the newest version of the Registry of candidate cis-Regulatory Elements (cCREs) is out 🧬 Huge thanks to the many collaborators, experimentalists, analysts and software developers who made this work possible — truly a team effort! A "meme-torial" of the science is coming soon 👀

If you have time to doom scroll, you have time to read books!

a huge victory for universities, worth billions of dollars: Trump can’t cap indirect-cost rates on NIH grants, appeals court rules www.chronicle.com/blogs/the-tr... via @andyandy.bsky.social

Now published in Algorithms for Molecular Biology: link.springer.com/article/10.1.... Key message: a tiny CNN model with 7k parameters can capture main splice signals across vertebrates+insect and halves the minimap2 & miniprot junction error rate. I always use this new feature now.

DNA sequence quantitatively encodes CTCF-binding affinity at genome scale https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.05.696797v1

New work from @miyapan.bsky.social and our team, bringing ant, bee, and wasp labs together. @chuanxinyu.bsky.social shows that the ANTSR locus we discovered in ants has determined sex for 150+ My across bees and stinging wasps 🐜🐝, despite virtually no sequence conservation 😮 doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

I'm excited to share that our preprint is now available on bioRxiv! Our study challenges the widespread use of molecular genetic diversity as a predictor adaptive potential, with important implications for how genetic data is used to inform conservation decisions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...