I do not understand how *every* mechanism I review grants for requires me to submit detailed feedback, yet everything I apply to is just like yeeting science into the void.

Detection of metastatic burden in mouse models should be done in 3D and at single-cell resolution.

The solution is CODA, a workflow that maps organs, tumors and mets exhaustively, in 3D, and at single-cell resolution.

Read about this here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It’s brutal in academia right now. A lot is out of our control, but it doesn’t cost anything to remember that there are humans behind papers and grants…reviewers, program officials and funders can be more empathetic in the face of unprecedented chaos in the US scientific enterprise.

Turns out even when your institution has an agreement with Springer Nature that covers gold OA publication fees, they can just decide not to honor that agreement and refuse to make your paper available unless you pay up! No more reviewing for or submitting to GeroScience for me @springernature.com

Our NIAAA funded Post-DoctT32 has received its NoA (non competing renewal). Are you looking for a post-doc and interested in joining our amazing center? If so, reach out! Here is a convenient form that you can use to upload CV and a cover letter!

unc.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

AAMC: NIH Has Only Obligated 15% of External Research Funding The science community fears the funding agency’s slow contract and grant making could result in another rush of multiyear obligations at the end of the fiscal year. The NIH director has said, “Don’t p...

NIH is WAY under schedule in obligating its external research funding.

Halfway through the fiscal year they're only at 15%!
#AcademicSky #ResearchSky

www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Untangling mechanisms underlying #CancerDrugResistance www.nature.com/articles/s41... @jess_ljx @arjunraj.bsky.social #Cancer #DrugResistance #TranslationalScience

Here is the "effective payline" for each institute, estimated (by Claude) as the percentile where one can expect 80% probability of funding from a logistic regression fit. The effective payline has gone from a historic ~12% to 6% in 2025.

Cool!!

There's a lot we still don't know about BEC heterogeneity! But hopefully this manuscript provides a foundation for our lab and others to keep pursuing questions related to how different BEC subpopulations respond to changing physiological conditions in liver health and disease.

Validating our candidate metagenes in situ yielded some cool spatial observations and provided a high-confident approach for matching control and injured BEC clusters for subpopulation-specific differential expression analysis.

...but how could we apply this panel of 7 genes as usable BEC subpopulation biomarkers? Kendall developed a 9-color RNA FISH panel, capable of identifying both enrichment of an "on target" metagene and de-enrichment of all other "off target" metagenes (also capable of making pretty images)

Bc of this transcriptional similarity, most differentially expressed genes were expressed across all BEC clusters, just at slightly variable levels. To identify cluster-specific biomarkers, Kendall applied "metagenes", mostly consisting of two overlapping genes to define a candidate subpopulation.

scRNA-seq has been powerful for cell-cell heterogeneity in other systems, but liver atlases present BECs as a single population with little apparent transcriptional diversity. We observed that injury and hepatocyte identity were the only major drivers of "distinct" clusters in our own data.

Now that we're settled at @unc-cbp.bsky.social I'm excited to share the lab's latest preprint tinyurl.com/y8755f2n From 1st author Kendall Kanakanui (@kkanak.bsky.social an @emory-gmb.bsky.social student) it represents a years-long effort to define heterogeneity among biliary epithelial cells (BECs)

Happy International Day of Women & Girls in Science! Today & everyday I am grateful for the opportunity to work alongside & learn from this talented group of women scientists. Funded by grants from the NIH, this team is working to understand how the gut microbiome affects our digestive health.

In our new poll with the Boston Globe of NIH funded scientists in Mass ...
- 72% say they have delayed or cancelled projects
- 66% reduced research scope
- 56% paused experiments or students.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/09/m...

Microscopy image of a kidney only showing the highly branched arterial tree in magenta against a black background.

The beauty of the kidney arterial tree for this #FluorescenceFriday. Evans Blue dye labels the vasculature. Image courtesy of postdoc Sarah McLarnon.

My department at Washington State University is recruiting an Assistant or Associate Professor in vector-borne disease 🕷️🦟🦠

Full job description is linked below.

Come join us on the Palouse!

Wiley: "We’re supporting responsible research assessment practices" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1520...

Also Wiley: "Prove that your article is a good fit for this journal 😉😉😉😉😉 by citing at least two of our articles in your manuscript before we will even consider reviewing it" 🤡

I heard a lot of similar stories last year, and more this year. Lots of 4th rotations. This is devastating for the future of science. We reject many superb applicants to PhD programs every year, because spots are limited. Now we struggle to find labs for admitted students.

Hallmarks of cancer—Then and now, and beyond Hanahan revisits the evolving framework of cancer hallmarks, synthesizing 25 years of conceptual refinement into a multidimensional view of tumor biology. This review highlights how aberrant capabilit...

Follow up to Doug Hanahan’s visionary article about the stages of cancer development from back in the 1990s

www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

If you, as a scientist, cannot be bothered to engage in the intellectual work of science, please quit your job and leave it to someone with skill and integrity.

Whoa…interesting

The constant succession of administrative crises undermining science in the US is exhausting.

FY26 was the hardest LHHS bill I’ve ever worked on. After a year spent witnessing this administration tear apart and eliminate entire federal programs that millions of Americans rely on, our bill re-establishes and increases funding for many of them. It provides a $415 million increase for The National Institutes of Health, among many important others, and ensures that investment results in more research grants being awarded. This bill is the culmination of an incredibly long, frustrating, exhausting negotiating process of late and sleepless nights. It always is. But this year was different for all of the obvious reasons. There were moments we didn’t think we could possibly get it done. I’m proud we kept up the fight until the bitter end because what we achieved is pretty damn impressive. Did we get everything we wanted? No, it’s never enough. That’s why it’s a compromise. But there are a number of bright spots sprinkled throughout the final product that matter. The most important is that Congress is finally reasserting its power of the purse. 💰 Hope is on the horizon. So let’s go, we’re ready for year 2.

From Meghan Mott on LinkedIn

1/2

The language on multiyear funding (MYF) is ineffective.

Final bill anchors MYF to 2025 instead of 2024. This means MYF will likely continue at the same rate we saw last year, where NCI's payline from ~10% to 4%.

This is incredibly harmful to the US research workforce - especially early career.

Quantitative 3D Imaging of Mouse and Human Intrahepatic Bile Ducts in Homeostasis and Liver Injury Intrahepatic bile ducts (IHBDs) form a complex hierarchical network essential for liver function. The remodeling and expansion of this network during ductular reaction (DR) are hallmarks of liver dise...

FINALLY out in AJPath - the second manuscript from @hannahhrncir.bsky.social’s PhD at Emory! Hannah developed a novel pipeline for quantitative 3D light sheet microscopy of bile ducts that will hopefully be a great resource to the community. ajp.amjpathol.org/article/S000...

HUGE problem!

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