2,599 applicants offered NSF GRFP awards! Congrats to all the NSF GRFP award winners and recipients of honorable mention. https://www.research.gov/grfp/AwardeeList.do?method=loadAwardeeList

Massive and important positive news...

#NSF #GRFP awards are out.

2,599 awards!
+
1,440 Honorable Mentions.

A significant boost from last year.

Congratulations to the winners (and HM-s)!

& many thanks to the reviewers & program officers who made this possible.

www.research.gov/grfp/Awardee...

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

Point of View: An easy way to improve lab meetings Sharing positive and negative experiences at lab meetings can make a career in science a little less hard, a little more pleasant, and a little more human.

Point of View: An easy way to improve lab meetings doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

I'm really happy to see this one out @elife.bsky.social. Awesome Cara Glynn and I describe and reflect on a year-long, low-cost practice that transformed our group meetings.

#researchculture #ECR #labmeetings

Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice Evolution has shaped the genetic code, with subtle pressures leading to preferences for some synonymous codons over others. Codons are translated at different speeds by the ribosome, imposing constrai...

This preprint from Helen Sakharova is one of the coolest things to come out of my lab: “Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice.” Codon choice is a big puzzle in how information is encoded in genomes, and we have a new angle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

APEX-seq maps transcriptome-wide subcellular RNA localization in living cells Nature Protocols - This Protocol describes the transcriptome-wide labeling of RNAs in a particular subcellular compartment using proximity biotinylation by localized APEX2 enzyme and subsequent...

Excited to share our @natprot.nature.com paper on using RNA proximity labeling to map subcellular RNA transcriptomes. We’ve been working in this area for a while and wanted to create a resource paper to guide the uninitiated reader. rdcu.be/fblvI

Using two orthogonal methods, we find negligible IRES activity from Hoxa9 and other candidate IRESes. We also validate PacBio IsoSeq to map 5’ UTRs and show a purported Hoxa9 “IRES” smFISH probe detects a non-coding miRNA precursor transcript in the nucleus. (4/4)

Though these "toolbox" methods appeared to validate the Hoxa9 “IRES”, older work found promoters generate false-positives in back-splicing circRNA plasmids. In our preprint, we show the toolbox's circRNA plasmid also makes artifacts that can cause false-positive IRES calls. (3/4)

We previously published a paper on mRNA annotation errors that caused gene promoters to be mistaken as cellular IRESes, most prominently in mouse Hoxa9. In response, Koch et al. proposed using back-splicing circRNA plasmids to study IRESes and smFISH to map mRNA 5’ UTRs. (2/4)

Check out our new preprint on IRES studies (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...). We show a recently proposed IRES “toolbox” results in mRNA annotation errors and false-positive IRES activities. We provide an alternative set of robust approaches. (1/4)

Awesome representation from @uwmadscience.bsky.social at the @asbmb.bsky.social #ASBMB2026 meeting in DC! #ScienceServesUsAll

We are delighted to announce our next RNA Society Member Spotlight!
www.rnasociety.org/joel-mcmanus...

Dr. Joel McManus @mcmanuslabrna.bsky.social is an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA.

Another record month for bioRxiv - and further evidence the pandemic spike+dip was just that and growth continues. Thanks to all involved and that includes 🫵

These are amazing stories. Lucy Shapiro is one of my scientific heroes, Steve McKnight has made such fundamental contributions to many fields, and triple drug therapies for CF represent an amazing story in chemical biology and protein folding and I often teach this to undergrads.