Image of two fly heads. The left one has normal eyes, while in the right one the eye is degenerated. Eye degeneration is caused by eye specific expression of a RNAi construct against eyes absent (eya), an essential gene for eye morphogenesis. The eya RNAi construct is located on the vector backbone of the donor plasmid that was used in this CRISPR knock-in experiment.

Chasing donor backbone insertions in #CRISPR knock-in experiments is a great way to waste an afternoon (or more), unless you use a dominant marker. We like this one from the Carthew lab, in which animals containing the backbone have degenerated eyes:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

#Drosophila

Photo of a runner grinning ear to ear after the finish line of the 2026 Boston Marathon wearing a Boston Children's Hospital team jersey, and sunshine beaming down from above.

Ran my second Boston Marathon yesterday! A day of ups and downs - all for the kids at Boston Children's Hospital 💙
If you like, you can donate here: secure.childrenshospital.org/goto/mikelac...

But if you're an editor and handle clinical AI, becoming a friend with the TRIPOD AI checklist may not be the worst idea 14/

www.equator-network.org/reporting-gu...

We are looking for a human MALAT1 overexpression plasmid.

Does any of you kind people have it?

Opinion | Don’t Use A.I. to Do This

“I’m not saying all this to defend humanity. Humanity sucks. It’s totally terrible. I’m saying this because I believe in an old-fashioned virtue called Doing the Freakin’ Work.”

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...

blog.addgene.org A Modular, Synthetic Origin of Replication

SynORI plasmids from the Chappell Lab solve problems with plasmid copy number and plasmid incompatibility. If you want to modify your plasmid instead of your experiment, check out their post about the tool here:

Mirror mirror on the wall who is the brightest of them all?

Brightness is a key parameter for choosing fluorescent reporters in bioimaging. As tricky to assess, we present a pipeline to compare chemigenetic labels and FPs in tissue culture and #zebrafish embryos.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is so, so well-articulated.

Side-by-Side Systematic Characterization of Novel FPs in Budding Yeast Fluorescent proteins (FPs) have become indispensable to biological research. Since the discovery of the first FP, Aequorea victoria green fluorescent protein (avGFP), new fluorescent proteins have bee...

Congrats to Dennis Botman - the driving force behind this study - for this publication:
Side-by-Side Systematic Characterization of Novel FPs in Budding Yeast
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

‘Why is publishing so expensive?’ For many of us who work in scientific publishing, the title of this Editorial is a question we hear all the time when we're out talking to academics. And it's a perfectly reasonable one. After all, re...

Plus, see the breakdown for other journals in the family:
J Cell Sci: doi.org/10.1242/jcs....
J Exp Biol: doi.org/10.1242/jeb....
Dis Model Mech: doi.org/10.1242/dmm....
Biol Open: doi.org/10.1242/bio....

and "our publishing costs have grown significantly in recent years (by 22% in real terms – after accounting for inflation – between 2015 and 2024). We have worked hard to avoid passing these costs on to our community ... our income has decreased by 10% in real terms over the same period" ...

Thank you @biologists.bsky.social for sharing these numbers.
"quality editorial assessment and publishing involves a lot of people [salaries & editor stipends] ... and publishers have had to invest heavily in technologies to support professional and trustworthy online publishing" ...

A thought about job adverts. I assume seeking "exceptional" individuals selects for specific character traits (eg self confidence). My goal is to get candidate with best potential, even if they don't yet think of themselves that way. What words do you use to encourage the widest pool of applicants?

a blonde dude with lots of tattoos and jeffrey dahmer glasses looks moodily at the camera with a Very Cool t-shirt with a goth girl on it, surrounded by flowers. Underneath it says Plant Native Plants

A person with glasses in a lovely backyard and long brown hair wears a black t-shirt that says biology is bigger than binaries with a honeybee, lily, and clownfish on it

We have 2 cool shirts! I have to sell them out by early April for 2 reasons:

1) 5 of my family members are staying in the Skype a Scientist stockroom in mid-April 😅
2) I need to fund our mural project which starts the first week of April!

They're soft! They're cute! Get a shirt!
SquidFacts.net

Actually now Addgene's hiring for multiple roles! Please share, and if this looks like you - apply!
🧬 Senior Research Scientist: addgene.applytojob.com/apply/RjIwJ3...
📝 Senior Science Communications Manager: addgene.applytojob.com/apply/6q7Pr6...

🧪 #scicomm #hiring #sciencejobs

Actually now Addgene's hiring for multiple roles! Please share, and if this looks like you - apply!
🧬 Senior Research Scientist: addgene.applytojob.com/apply/RjIwJ3...
📝 Senior Science Communications Manager: addgene.applytojob.com/apply/6q7Pr6...

🧪 #scicomm #hiring #sciencejobs

🙏Can anyone advise about injecting AAVs in neonates?🙏

CAG-flex-gcamp6f, www.addgene.org/100835/, co injected with GfaABC1D-Cre-4x6T in AAV5 (www.addgene.org/196410/?

@bdiazcastro.bsky.social @loogerl.bsky.social @nilskorte.bsky.social @murphyroyallab.org @dr-vmosienko.bsky.social

Codon optimization ‘bake-off’ suggests native constructs are best tool for mammalian protein expression New work from IPI suggests scientists may have overestimated the value of codon optimization ...

💫Preprint alert 💫

A new IPI study suggests scientists may be overestimating the value of #codonoptimization when producing #mammalianproteins in mammalian cell lines, throwing the value of these strategies into question.

Read more: buff.ly/1vUqbTj

It’s incredibly hard to study lipids in biological membranes on the nanoscale. You need near-perfect information on both membrane ultrastructure and lipid density. Lipid-CLEM, now out in @natcellbio.nature.com brought to you by @mathilda95.bsky.social changes that:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ever felt constrained by the "4-color limit" in fluorescence imaging?

We use DNA-barcoded labeling to build high-plex panels, enabling imaging of 15 targets across the full fluorescence spectrum.

doi.org/10.64898/202...

Grateful to @sinemsaka.bsky.social and all authors for making this possible.

MFM - Boston Marathon 2026: Support me fundraising for Boston Children's Hospital I've joined the Miles for Miracles team because I am passionate about helping kids at Boston Children’s Hospital find lifesaving care, and give families hope. Will you help me reach my fundraising goal with a donation today?

In ONE MONTH(!) I'll be running the Boston Marathon for Boston Children's Hospital. Training, fundraising, and running with this team is such an honor and an inspiration. If you can spare a few bucks ($10, $26, more??), today's a great day to donate:
secure.childrenshospital.org/goto/mikelac...

Graphics stating Apply to be a Preprint Editor

If you are interested in this initiative, Development has a call for Preprint Editors – active researchers with their finger on the pulse of preprint literature – to commission and write ‘In preprints’ articles. Apply by Monday 30 March 2026.

Find out more: journals.biologists.com/dev/pages/pr...

This is heartbreaking and it’s coming for more of us. My daily panic is focused on figuring out how I am going to fund students and keep my lab open without another grant, and I’m not alone. So many of us want to be here, do science, and mentor but without federal support, our labs will close. 💔

Scientific Publishing: Rethinking how research is reviewed and published Taking a radical new approach to the publication process resulted in eLife losing its impact factor, but authors, reviewers, editors and funders support the journal and its efforts to reform…

2/ Alongside today's blog, eLife Editor-in-Chief, Timothy Behrens and Deputy Editors Yamini Dalal and Diane Harper assess the past three years and outline some of the changes that will be made over the course of 2026.

buff.ly/O5IFD7j

Wondering what's the difference between Halorhodopsin and Channelrhodopsin? Curious how a plant photosensor domain could power your next gene editing experiment? Check out our Optogenetics Guide to learn about these tools and more to light up your lab! 🧠💡🔬

Senior Science Communications Manager - Addgene - Career Page Come find out why Addgene has been recognized as a Top Place to Work by the Boston Globe (8 times), BuiltIn, and NABR!

Our team at @addgene.bsky.social is hiring a senior #scicomm manager - a fantastic opportunity! If you want to join some amazing colleagues at a great place to work, check it out:
addgene.applytojob.com/apply/6q7Pr6...

Frameshift: How Caitlin Vander Weele made science communication her business Her favorite part of research was talking about it. So she left academia and turned that passion into a successful company.

“The thing about Ph.D.s is they can figure stuff out.” In our latest Frameshift Q&A, @caitvw.bsky.social explains how she used her science-communication skills and entrepreneurial prowess to transform her passion into a successful company.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/craft-and-ca...

what sequencing-based strategy do people like to look at CRISPR/cas9 editing in a polyclonal cell population? in the past i have used Sanger+the TIDE algorithm. I know some labs amplify the target region and do NGS- if that option, what company would you use? any other options?

This is exactly how my class discussion started. These are graduate students, btw. A lot of students really take my courses for writing instruction and not content. So the issue of finishing a draft comes up.

Turns out they cannot write (or read a long text) because they have every notification on

NIH pivots away from agency-directed science US biomedical funding behemoth says the approach will boost innovation, but some researchers worry that understudied areas of science will suffer.

The US NIH is stepping back from 'top-down' science.

My latest analysis for @nature.com shows that funding calls have plummeted by 90%, funneling billions into broad, 'investigator-initiated' ideas, rather than targeted, agency-driven ones.

A massive shift for the American biomedical enterprise.