My favourite discovery ever has just come online. Can I please tell you about some seriously wacky molecular biology? The story starts with a reverse transcriptase that SOMEHOW defends bacteria from viruses. (👇 I recommend sound ON for the video 🎹) 1/

Nature is amazing! Congratulations to Max Wilkinson and team on a beautiful study revealing a clever way that bacteria defend against viruses. Check out Max’s posts for more detail! doi.org/10.1126/scienc…

If you think journal names convey no information then you are wrong. If you think they convey perfect information, then you are also wrong. Also, all the focus on CNS obscures the fact that there is a quite clear line in quality and scope between certain tiers of journals.

This sounds controversial but I think it is actually right. Even if a fancy journal is 90% fame and pedigree and 10% purely random, that still serves some function in democratizing access. Still, pretty far from an ideal system.

escape room but the only way out is to finish writing your paper

Preprints, and the fact that they do not preclude publication in the glams, has been a game changer for science. For expediting it and making it better.

Dear anybody making plots: underscores are not spaces. PC1_no_GFP is not a valid name for an axis.

We've started IND-enabling studies on a small molecule corrector for Rho-associated autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa (Rho-adRP). I thought it would be fun to spend some time walking through our approach and why we are excited. Long 🧵1/

Learned that SUV39, which is a H3K9 methyltransferase, has 39 in the name not because of what it methylates but because in the fly screen that identified it, it was on chromosome 3, mutation number 9. What a coincidence!

I’m glad someone tested this!

If you had 5-10 minutes to collect broad health information from a research participant, what info would you collect? Is there a pre-existing health survey you'd recommend that would fit into this time frame? This is not a lot of time, so the trade-offs are tough...

Excited to see our team’s work on Fanzor now published in Cell! Amazing effort by Peiyu Xu and the entire team in uncovering the structural diversity and DNA cutting mechanisms of Fanzor. Proud of everyone involved! Onward to more discoveries. 🚀

Sorry for maybe dumb question: you know how ppl differentiate iPSCs into all kinds of cells? Can they diff into cell types that don’t normally exist in nature?

I have always found this mysterious.

Super slow peer review processes are the "everyone-in-academia-is-quietly-quitting-as-a-silent-protest" canary in the coal mine.

One of the biggest challenges in the transition from early career to mid-career is that early on, most decisions have enough data to be well informed. After, most decisions are under-sampled, so you have to trust your gut. This data-to-vibes transition is… unsettling.

Anyone know if you can take tissue lysate in RIPA or trizol and still use it for a hydroxyproline assay?

What would make data sharing useful *and practical* is some analysis of what kinds of data are useful to share. I'd rather do more science than collect data-sharing merit badges.

#Cellsize is important for many cellular processes, including biosynthesis, organelle homeostasis and development. If you need an overview of how cell size is controlled, and how it affects cell function, we have you covered: doi.org/10.1152/physre… Yagya Chadha Arohi Khurana

It seems all my icons are slowly turning black. What does it mean????