❓Can a father’s environmental exposures before conception influence their offspring? We systematically tackled this - identifying effects of paternal age, environment and genetics on early embryos - as well as confounding influences www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

I do like the fact that this is in the UFC section of the sports news. First for me TBH.

Seven years. Over 400 pages. About 750 references. Over 40 figures. Finally I get to hold the finished book. It’s a big day. #EpigeneticsBook @cshlpress.bsky.social

Our key observation is that rolling equilibria can be extracted from the Morse-Smale complex of the support function over the Gauss map. Our method is hence purely geometric, and does not make use of random sampling or numerical time integration. Yet surprisingly…makes extremely accurate predictions

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea. From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

🚂 The T2T train keeps rolling: "The formation and propagation of human Robertsonian chromosomes" with Gerton and Garrison labs is out! What's a Robertsonian chromosome? Let Jen tell you herself in this great video, or read our paper: [1/3] 📺 youtu.be/JmlY5omxQVc 📄 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Phenomenal. In my 10 year update of A Brief History, I make the point that in the first edition, not one disease had been successfully treated using gene therapy. Today that number is at least 7.

I am excited to share our new preprint on the CAGE complex, a mysterious hollow protein complex that I first saw years ago while surveying Tetrahymena ciliary lysate www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #cilia #protistsonsky 🧬🧪

in terms of impact its Norwich to Tilbury and Sealink that have the biggest hits if not in place for 30 (31 atm)

Good thread, and you're not wrong. Thanks for the shout-out. My piece is now out on pod/YouTube. Also: Zonal Pricing would have broken the link between power prices and (high) gas prices. And electrification is the way to reduce grid costs as it grows the denominator. youtu.be/OFF1imh1U2c?...

Energy transition and UK politics. This is an area where I am definitely an amateur, armchair expert, but interested and can... read a chart etc. Politically I am just a citizen really. Still I think we're going to be entering an interesting phase in the energy transition and UK politics.

This revealed something surprising: long-read de novo assembly methods can now outperform reference-based variant calling not just in terms of completeness, but also in terms of overall accuracy, by a substantial margin (10 QV)! [7/14]

Delighted to finally announce a preprint describing the Q100 project! “A complete diploid human genome benchmark for personalized genomics” For which we finished HG002 to near-perfect accuracy: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵[1/14]

The UK system of proving your identity by … providing a picture of your utility bill … is so mad. A sensible ID card system like many perfectly sensible democracies have with strong technical and legal controls … why not? Why is this the way ?

EMBL scientists found metabolism controls embryonic development tempo through signalling in a way separate from its established metabolic function. More research related to this signalling could illuminate how it guides cell fate, developmental timing -- even disease. www.embl.org/news/science...

Thank you! Yes, it uses DP to compute the maximal ungapped score, followed by a GPU-based Gotoh–Smith–Waterman, so no k-mer index is required. The drawback is that you can’t trade sensitivity for speed, but full DP searches against UniProt in milliseconds open up many exciting applications.

Heh. It’s 2038 that’s gonna be the epic. Mark my 32bit words. 🤣

Munging Dates. Got to love the POSIX 2018 standard "On input, values 00 to 68 are prefixed by 20 and 69 to 99 by 19 – that is the behaviour specified by the 2018 POSIX standard, but ‘it is expected that in a future version the default century inferred from a 2-digit year will change’.

Postdoc in genomics or X-ray imaging - broadly defined? Want to run your own lab? PI in Cell biology and want to lead an area of science, hiring faculty and setting direction of an area? Want work in Europe's leading life science laboratory, working language English? Check out the jobs below!!

The Garnett Lab is excited to launch DepMap Miner, a new tool to explore cancer dependency data! Built on the Sanger DepMap, the DepMap Miner brings together multi-omic and functional datasets for over 1300 cancer cell models. Start mining data now: dataminer.depmap.sanger.ac.uk

What are the implications of a new A.I. model that predicts the risk of a person's disease(s) 20 years ahead and when they will appear? erictopol.substack.com/p/dawn-of-a-...

One for the careful reading list - heritability inside full sibs in @23andme.bsky.social - the whole business of moving towards within family designs is really powerful. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

A frequent thought during seminars on ostensibly unrelated topics

Registration is now open for the Mutational Scanning Symposium!! This is one not to miss. Invited speakers include @mehurles.bsky.social @sangerinstitute.bsky.social @maitreya.bsky.social @uwgenome.bsky.social #VariantEffect26 Register soon for the early bird rate! ℹ️➡️https://www.mss2026.org

Generative AI for disease trajectories. Cool idea, trained on a big datasets from the UK biobank and validated on large Danish cohorts. Interesting potential for public health, predicting future incidence of all disease well into the future. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@riyavsinha.bsky.social @jengreitz.bsky.social sky.social @anshulkundaje.bsky.social y.social have made the ENCODE-rE2G data available to browse through the E2G portal, a custom-built extension of the Platform 👇 We plan to further integrate their data 👀 e2g.stanford.edu

Cool work from @ewanbirney.bsky.social Moritz Gerstung, Tom Fitzgerald about modeling health trajectories with generative AI! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What if you could get a glimpse of the future of your health, today? Our scientists have developed a new generative AI model, trained using large-scale health records, that can estimate how human health may change over time. Watch to find out more. 🖥️🧬

thanks, Ewan. this would have been impossible without AlphaFold. We tried for years to express recombinant Drosophila Piwi for loading it with a defined piRNA. Only wizards like Ian MacRae, Phil Zamore, En-Zhi Shen & Jianping Wu succeeded with silkworm and mouse PIWI proteins.

My favorite experiment: targeted mutations in Piwi in flies that prevent it from binding Gtsf1/Asterix generate a Piwi protein that is loaded with piRNAs, translocates into the nucleus, but is unable to silence transposons, causing full sterility. A mutation we have been dreaming of for years.

This is one of the main "immune systems for the genome" - sophisticated machinery that can detect and suppress genome parasites (transposons). It's cool molecular biology and hat's off to @juliusbrennecke.bsky.social and team for working out yet more detail of it.

Introducing ParTIpy, a python package for Pareto Task Inference that scales to large-scale datasets, including single-cell and spatial transcriptomics. 🔗 Manuscript: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💻 Code: partipy.readthedocs.io

And learn what fully AI-generated websites look like. Avoid them, as they are more likely to be scam.

minimap2.com is potentially a phishing site. Please don't use anything from that website. github.com/lh3/minimap2...

The #Drosophila Dscam1 gene generates 10000s of isoforms, but only a small fraction supports neuronal functions. This study shows that #fitness & #immunity are the likely primary evolutionary drivers of Dscam1 isoform diversity in #arthropods @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4gp8cWd

Join us this December for the UK Biobank Scientific Conference 2025 - available both in-person in London and online! Discover the latest research breakthroughs, innovative developments and take the opportunity to network with researchers, industry experts, and the UK Biobank team.

Bioinformaticians / computational biologists take note - know where you should take your OS tool chain from and do not introduce backdoors.

The #PragmaticClimateReset is a two part-essay calling for a reset in our approach to climate action. Part I shows why narratives trumpeting the failure of efforts to date are wrong. Part II says that, nevertheless, the climate community now needs to change its approach. 1/n

I often think about this study that shows ducklings swimming in a single-file formation behind their parent conserve energy through wave-riding, where trailing ducklings gain forward push, and wave-passing, where energy transfers efficiently along the line. Get your ducks in a row.

@embl.org Heidelberg is looking for a new Head of Scientific Instrumentation! This is an exciting opportunity at the interface between scientific research and technology development, overseeing our mechanical and electronic workshops! embl.wd103.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/EMBL/d...

Mendelian randomization (MR) was partly a response to the many epidemiological studies suggesting vitamins were protective against various diseases, only for randomised trials to be null. The story of how fallacious MR attempted to resurrect the spurious claims here academic.oup.com/ije/article/...

This is ... so sensible. The politics and pitch feels right to me (I like the coinage "Net-zero-ish") - basically follow the technology curves to achieve the economically achievable 90% emission cut this "horizon" (decade?)

Join EMBL AI! We have ambitious plans to transform life sciences research through AI. Interested in using ML/AI to solve complex interdisciplinary challenges? We’re looking for two senior leaders based at EMBL Heidelberg👇

🧠🦈Excited to present our latest work🧠🦈Interested in brain evolution? And shark embryos? Then read on… Our work sheds light on the deep origins of our brain’s most complex regions.

💡Latest DECIPHER features! ⚛️ ProtVar (www.ebi.ac.uk/ProtVar/) links to functional annotations of missense variants ⚕️ ClinGen (clinicalgenome.org) VCEP Recommendations highlighted 📝 Descriptive names for gene & protein predictive scores 👉 More info www.deciphergenomics.org #variantinterpretation

Sometimes you meet absolutely incredible bioinfo-magicians. It was a huge privilege when @shenwei356.bsky.social joined our group for a year on an @embl.org sabbatical. While here, he developed a new way of aligning to millions of bacteria, called LexicMap 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My plans to start a new university in Dorset have run into significant economic headwinds, but I am confident that the business case is solid

“Helsinki has not recorded a single traffic fatality in the past 12 months, city and police officials confirmed this week.” City engineer credits lower speed limits and smart design. I agree. #Helsinki #VisionZero

Note that there's a fairly narrow window of demand where zero-carbon running would be possible; not too little (Iberian blackout scenario) not so much that wind+imports+nuclear+Drax can't meet demand

On the gas-free part, last thing I recall is that "brief periods" in 2025 sre still part of the plan. The last four (of 15) synchronous compensators are due be installed by the end of October; could be that we see a period or two before year-end