No Kings, no lies, no war!!
#nokings

Boston!!!

It’s been a pleasure to organize the Rules of Protein-DNA Recognition meeting in Cancun. Spectacular talks and an amazing and supportive scientific community!

Congrats! Amazing work!

Amazing work. Congrats!

This is big!

We work on gene regulatory networks, in particular related to viruses.

Excited to share this collaborative review with @dsegre.bsky.social and @devmoy.bsky.social. We discuss common issues with context-specific genome-scale metabolic network models and provide recommendation for future model development.

Amazing work by Tommy Taslim, Joseph Finkelberg, Susan Kales, and many other members of Ryan's and my lab.
8/8

Finally, we found several CREs that are activated by different signals, such as interferon gamma and dexamethasone, which may contribute to viral reactivation or immune evasion mechanisms.
7/8

We also show how that the genomes of different herpesviruses have very different CRE landscapes, with different proportion of promoter-like, proximal, distal, and CTF-only CREs, different activity levels, and different localization.
6/8

One of these regions (Psi) is present in most adenoviral vectors and contributes to basal transgene expression. We mutated this region, without affecting packaging capacity, which led to reduced basal activity and increased inducibility.
5/8

We also identify many novel CREs in adenoviral genomes, some conserved across strains and isolates and others highly variable.
4/8

By testing multiple isolates and performing saturation mutagenesis experiments, we identify regions in the HPV long control region that are highly variable in activity and the nucleotide changes responsible for such variability.
3/8

Contrary to human CREs, most virus CREs are promoter-like and overlap with coding sequences. These CREs are regulated by TFs such as SP/KLF, ETS factors, CREB, YY1 and others.
2/8

Exited to share our recent work on viral cis-regulatory elements in collaboration with @tewhey.bsky.social!
We identified >2000 CREs across the genomes of 27 human-infecting dsDNA viruses from the Herpesvirus, Adenovirus, Papillomavirus, and Polyomavirus families.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
1/8

Congrats Alex!

Deaths from heart disease down 75%, that’s NIH.

Deaths from stroke down 75%, that’s NIH.

HIV/AIDS no longer a death sentence, that’s NIH.

99% of FDA approved drugs in the last decade, that’s NIH.

Please show this video to anyone who doesn’t understand why the NIH is so important.

Congrats Sebastian!

Congrats Polly!!! Super well-deserved!

Exited to share our recent work on TF isoforms! Amazing work by @kaiamattioli.bsky.social Luke Lambourne and Clarissa Santoso and many other collaborators.

From 2010 to 2016 (latest data I have ), NIH research contributed to EVERY drug approved by the FDA

Scientists are unfairly and devastatingly seeing their grants cut and careers thrown into uncertainty, yet are still working 24/7 to continue their research, treat patients, talk to journalists, advocate with elected officials, and keep the public informed about potential threats. Absolute heroes!

There are days in life that shake you.

I’m shattered 💔 to share that I just found out that the US Government terminated my 2024 NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (~$2 million), threatening my long-promised assistant professor job at Columbia University
& academic career... 1/🧵

Scientists have just cured pancreatic cancer in some patients with personalized mRNA vaccines. Pancreatic cancer. And this Trump administration wants to throw it all away.

They’re throwing away a cure for cancer.

This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH

The Stand Up For Science protests have kicked off worldwide. Thousands of scientists demonstrated in solidarity with their US counterparts across France to defend the scientific community. (📹 @Margot_Brunet_)

#3E #FranceProtests #USprotests #March7Science #StandUpForScience #Mar7

Stand up for Science rally in Boston

✊Massive turnout for STAND UP FOR SCIENCE rally in Boston #StandUpForScience

Standing up for science in Boston!

Map of Stand Up for Science events, with official SUFS events in Red and solidarity events in Blue

WHERE WILL YOU BE ON MARCH 7TH!?

Head to www.standupforscience2025.org/local-event-information/ or the link in our bio to find your closest event—or add one if you're hosting one!

#standupforscience2025