Maybe journals aren’t the root cause of problems in academia just a symptom…

Sampling of developmental stages across 61 animal species.

Thus, it remains unclear whether and which common principles underlie ZGA across animal evolution.

Here, we took a comparative & evolutionary approach, and generated a comprehensive transcriptomic atlas of early embryogenesis across 61 species spanning 13 animal phyla. 🐁🐟🦟🪱🐌🪼 3/15

Do you want to know when your favorite species activates its genome?

Just input its genome size (🧬 in bp) and egg volumen (🥚 in um3) here!

ZGA_onset = -2.37 * log10(gDNA/EggVol) + 11.74

LGR5 is not: bsky.app/profile/kars...

Sorry about that 😂

Bad idea... Well maybe not actually, could be a way to get them out whne they work too late 😅

Glad I just added support for plex technologies to alevin-fry ;P.

More genes apparently 😉

Here it is:
Atera: « High throughput. Whole transcriptome. Single cell sensitivity. »

pages.10xgenomics.com/wbr-2026-02-...
Thoughts?

1/ Philipp Mallm from the @dkfz.bsky.social Single-cell Open Lab just broke the news at #AACR26: the first results on colorectal cancer (CRC) tissue analysis with the new Atera spatial transcriptomics platform from @10xgenomics.bsky.social. Is it "making the impossible possible?" 🧵

A mechanism for adaptive genome regulation in cancer - Nature In this Perspective article, a theoretical framework for how the AP-1 family of transcription factors mediates cellular adaptation in cancer drug resistance is proposed.

a wonderful Perspective article www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This! AlphaFold is PDB + UniProt + Deep learning. No data sharing, no curation, no data standards, no AlphaFold.

Screen shot from Järvinen & Mik-Meyer (2026) Text reads: The third category of responses attributes the low proportion of female professors to barriers within academia—and here, we find a striking gender pattern: 30 out of 31 women, but only one-fifth of the men, suggest this type of explanation. Female interviewees echo all the university-related factors identified in the literature review above. For instance, they point to a lack of recognition of women's qualifications: ‘Men tend to see the qualities in other men and not in women, and the things they regard as genial in men are only irritating in women’ (Marina); ‘It's a question of taking women seriously. It's difficult to pinpoint, but women must walk the extra mile before they are recognised’ (Annette). Female interviewees also highlight a hierarchy of research fields: ‘The more women there are in a research field, the less prestigious it is’ (Isabella); ‘Women are situated in the margin of what is considered mainstream research, which means they have to fight harder’ (Clara). They also mention male networks, ‘There are some subtle mechanisms, you are not invited into the networks’

struck by this stat: 30/31 women identified systemic issues as responsible for gender disparities in academia vs 20% of men

From Järvinen & Mik-Meyer (2026):

doi.org/10.1111/1468...

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

Why bioRxiv exhibit 10000001

This summer, I'm going to major conferences in Europe by train. I've created two hashtags to share experience and encourage each other:
#NoFlySMBE bsky.app/profile/marc...
#NoFlyEED bsky.app/profile/marc...

Discussion with chatgpt where it generates what it sees based on a non existing picture. It offers to annotate the picture and then generates some picture that has nothing to do with anything.

gets even funnier.

Why not preprinting it? Some people like to suffer...

You need to make AI guidelines for your lab Here's why you should, and how to start

I wrote about why every lab should have AI use guidelines, and how to do it.

open.substack.com/pub/blekhman...

A one minute primer on how #AutoSpectral improves spectral flow cytometry unmixing by using per-cell calculation of autofluroscence spectra.

Use our R package and get higher quality spectral data, easy as that!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My university: "Copilot is Microsoft's AI-powered productivity service that uses large language models (LLMs) to help you create content, analyze information, summarize documents, and complete tasks more efficiently."

Microsoft: LOL

Wait. You can just say "we might infringe on your rights" in your Terms Of Service?

Chronic infection perturbs the affinity hierarchy of antiviral B cells | PNAS A key function of the germinal center (GC) reaction consists in the preferential expansion and enrichment of high-affinity B cell clones. Whether a...

Chronic infection perturbs the affinity hierarchy of antiviral B cells | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

💯👏

AI badly needs a dose of skepticism Some scientists are too eager to believe their own claims

"AI scientists are building ever-larger models, and then claiming that each model can solve even more than the previous one.

Then, model in hand, they go around looking around for problems to solve"

stevensalzberg.substack.com/p/ai-is-star...

Why do schizophrenia GWAS signals look so flat across the genome?

In our recent preprint, we explored why psychiatric disorders — and, more broadly, brain-related traits involving the central nervous system — appear to have unusual genetic architectures.

🧵1/n

I'm always shocked to see established PIs -- even some near retirement -- playing this "glam journal" game, instead of making use of their final years to try to fix the system...

Gilead refuses to sell groundbreaking HIV prevention drug to MSF Blocking humanitarian organizations from accessing a medical breakthrough puts vulnerable people across the world in danger.

Today, MSF is going public with something we've been fighting behind closed doors for months: Gilead will not sell us their new HIV drug, lenacapavir.

The sticking point isn't even price, they just refuse to sell.

Open letter linked + explainer 🧵1/

www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/gilea...

Do we grow wiser as we age?
I spent 15+ years chasing glam journals, wasting time and energy (and frustrating my team and co-authors).
I don’t want to wake up at 70 and realize my life went into convincing a few editors my work was trendy enough.
Enough. I’ll try to be smarter.

A table titled ‘Upcoming’ listing bioinformatics courses with columns for date, title, and instructors. Entries include: 13–17 April 2026 – Epigenomics Data Analysis (Dr. Jacques Serizay); 4–7 May 2026 – Network Analysis in R (Dr. Fabricio Almeida-Silva); 18–20 May 2026 – Spatial Omics in R/Bioconductor (Dr. Stefano Mangiola); 6–10 July 2026 – Developing R/Bioconductor Packages for Genomics (Dr. Jacques Serizay); and a TBD course on Single-cell proteomics with R and Bioconductor (Prof. Laurent Gatto).

📢 Bioconductor and Physalia Courses are offering 2 free seats per course, listed below, to participants based in low- or middle-income countries, with the aim of expanding access to high-quality training in bioinformatics and computational biology.

Interested? Apply here👉 bit.ly/3Pyyzjj