A big car park where the Darwin Building at King’s Building, University of Edinburgh used to be

The Darwin Building @edinburghup.bsky.social which housed the UK’s first Dept of Molecular Biology is no more! Many notable scientists worked their & passed through: 1968-2018. We look forward to a suitable replacement that promotes excellent biological research allowing many more key discoveries.

@edinburghairport.bsky.social What are you playing at? Delta 122 flight from Boston lands 06:30 Passengers have to wait on plane cos Customs hall does not open until 07:00 - Ridiculous get your act together FFS!!

New powerful article up in the New York Times on cancelled and delayed grants www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Looking forward to my visit to ibfg.usal-csic.es in Salamanca today. Thanks to Alfonso Fernandez Alvarez for inviting me.

NB: the UK - including Scotland - is an ERC partner, English speaking and has an exceptionally strong discovery research base.

Congratulations to our colleague Prof Donal O’Carroll FRS, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, on his election as a fellow of the Royal Society of London (the UK nation academy of sciences) - very well deserved.

And now for something completely different: my nephew Arthur Allshire (1st yr PhD student @bair.berkeley.edu) and co just released his first paper: Videomimic - Visual imitation enables contextual humanoid control. He is now working on sobering up the robot! www.videomimic.net

Gov.UK now needs to be proactive in making it attractive for disaffected scientists to move to the UK. Advantages: English speaking & exceptionally strong research base. An opportunity to drive future economic growth - act now or miss out! arstechnica.com/science/2025...

Pros: English speaking, strong research base. Cons: visa/health costs & broke universities. If, like EU, UK is to benefit by attracting disaffected talented scientists from other countries Gov.UK will need to make moving here attractive & affordable! Many non-OxBridge Universities can’t recruit.

Happy 65th to Paul Hewson (aka Bono @U2) as usual mine follows soon after yours - funny that. ‘It’s a beautiful day’ enjoy!

Looks like a fantastic AI tool for predicting protein sequences that will aggregate/form prions. Key was testing >100,000 in vivo using a neat assay in yeast/S. cerevisiae

Register for the excellent Epigenetics Gordon Research Conference Barcelona 10-15 Aug25. Theme: Epigenetic Variation: Mechanisms & Impact Across Systems. **FUNDING AVAILABLE to support attendance** ~15 talks to be chosen from submitted abstracts, so upload yours ASAP: www.grc.org/epigenetics-...

Congratulations to Wendy Bickmore on her election as an International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences www.nasonline.org

Congratulations to Bill Earnshaw, my colleague and lab next door, on his election as a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences www.nasonline.org

movie u have watched more than six times using gifs (hard mode no star wars star trek or LOTR) “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”

The power of NIH funded research. @deniswirtz.bsky.social hub.jhu.edu/2025/04/22/n...

Our latest collaborative work with Keith Matthews’ lab using synthetic DNA binding proteins to explore the chromatin protein contexts of repetitive sequences in Trypanosoma brucei in now on bioRxiv - thanks to all involved! 2025.04.22.649942; doi: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Almost there! 6 more points to seal it.

Very pleased to see @who.int publishing its very first reports on tests and treatments for #fungal #infections - and the contributions made by @bachmanntill.bsky.social, EID AMR Strategy lead. edinburgh-infectious-diseases.ed.ac.uk/news-and-eve... @allshire-lab.bsky.social @bethmills.bsky.social

How chromatin is replicated - key to understanding epigenetic memory mechanisms underlying epimutations

Register for the renowned Epigenetics Gordon Research Conference Barcelona 10-15 August 2025. A great line up of speakers on the theme: Epigenetic Variation: Mechanisms & Impact Across Systems. ~15 talks to be chosen from submitted abstracts, so upload yours ASAP: www.grc.org/epigenetics-...

20’ until the News Agents but the world to rights - or lefts or mid-road really- in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh

BREAKING: Elon Musk's rocket explosion nearly hit a commercial flight. This kind of content is being downranked on X. Please share it here. This is so dangerous.

Register interest in THE EPIGENETICS Gordon Research Conference Barcelona 10-15 August 2025. A great line up of speakers on the theme: Epigenetic Variation: Mechanisms & Impact Across Systems. ~15 talks to be chosen from submitted abstracts, so upload yours ASAP: www.grc.org/epigenetics-...

Alessia Buscaino at #ECFG17 gives a wonderful talk on her discovery that Candida albicans has active RNAi afterall and how she is unraveling its biological role in regulating TLO genes encoding a diverse array of Mediator Med2 proteins and in pathogenesis. See DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2315926121

Great talk from Aaron Vogan #ECFG17 on giant Starship transposable elements that move gene cargoes within and between fungal species to confer novel phenotypes. All regulated by the Captain Tyrosine recombinase. Very enterprising! Beam me up Scottie!

Post-doc in fungal molecular cell biology. Seeking person with an understanding of gene expression and phenotypic analysis, who is interested in epigenetic regulation in fungi, to explore mechanisms of antifungal resistance in Zymoseptoria tritici and Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Email me! #ECFG17

Great to be back in my home city Dublin for #ECFG17 Fungi are amazing, the things they do to survive …like paralyse passing nematodes as detailed in fantastic talk by Yen-Ping Hsueh doi: 10.1126/sciadv.ade4809 ‘Resistance is fungile’ Folks below are not infected, it was an oomycete in the potatoes!

Epigenetics Gordon Research Conference. Consider joining us for what will be an excellent, exciting meeting and will be held in Europe for the first time: 10-15 Aug25 Barcelona, Spain. Please repost and apply early - this meeting is popular! www.grc.org/epigenetics-...

Just managed to squeeze in a final 5.5k before the looming storm to take my total to 750k for 2024. Best wishes to all for 2025 - it seemed so far in the future when I was a 60s kid!

Great collaboration with Claudia, Nicolai et al. Congratulations to all!

Flowering time mutant or climate change (it has been very mild): Crocuses on the Leith Links Edinburgh at Christmas- 🤔 confused 💐 will probably snow soon - that will teach it!

Double whammy: Wellcome Centres are no more & MRC Units are on their last funding cycle. Huge blow to science in cities other than Cambridge-Oxford-London which continue to have well-funded institutes with excellent infrastructure (Crick, LMB etc). The rest of us…? www.science.org/content/arti...

In case you did not see it the first time posted. If you are interested in how chromatin-based epimutations mediate resistance in fungi …… read our latest preprint…….

Tell me you aren’t reading our brilliantly hilarious and informative timeline… …without telling me you aren’t reading our brilliantly hilarious and informative timeline.

A very considered and well argued piece by Dorothy Bishop. Those of us who remain can hopefully get this overturned: eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=http%3A%...

2 protocols here from the team - special thanks to Manu Shukla for organising it: ChIPmentation for Epigenomic Analysis in Fission Yeast doi: 10.1007/978-1-0716-4168-2_18 Genome-Wide Profiling of Histone Modifications in Fission Yeast Using CUT&Tag doi: 10.1007/978-1-0716-4168-2_22

As a Fellow of this august society I wonder what happed about this 🤔: www.theguardian.com/technology/a...

This succinctly sums up why many of us have switched from the other place: The exodus from X to Bluesky has happened – the era of mass social media platforms is over | Gaby Hinsliff www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I originally posted this 24Aug: “IMO: all scientific researchers, their institutes/universities, funding agencies, academic societies, & research publishers/journals should stop using Xitter. @Musk has made it toxic we should not support it” 3 mths on its even more urgent for scientists to act!

@buscainolab.bsky.social Welcome to Bluesky Alessia glad to see you have switched!

Our latest Preprint is now on BioRXiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... It explains how heterochromatin-dependent epimutations mediate resistance to caffeine & antifungals by imposing mitochondrial dysfunction. Thanks to all authors for their efforts especially Andreas Fellas & Alison Pidoux. Enjoy!

IMO: all scientific researchers, their institutes/universities , their funding agencies, academic societies, and research publishers/journals should stop using Xitter. @Musk has made it toxic cesspit - we should not support it.