Female mice grow testes after this single DNA tweak Small changes in the non-coding part of the genome have a key role in sex determination.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

My latest story is up! The components required for DNA and RNA are all present on asteroid Ryugu, which lends strong support to the hypothesis that the raw ingredients for life were present before the Sun even formed. A very fun and fascinating tale!

Our paper is now out in Science! Super excited to share our discovery that #mitochondria #pearling is the elusive mechanism driving the regular distribution and inheritance of #mtDNA nucleoids 🧬 [1/6]

Just discovered the wonderful covers of 'Genes to Cells', the journal of the Molecular Biology Society of Japan @mbsj-official.bsky.social – absolutely beautiful!

here some examples inspired by mitosis, CRISPR, the DNA helix, and plant pigments

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

There is so much to explore in this data that one can spend life time going through. To make it easier to go through the data, @miloj.bsky.social
put together this beautiful “Phage Datasheet”🤩

iseq.lbl.gov/PhageDataShe...

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

“first drafts of Results, Discussion, and Introduction should be the trainee’s own work. AI can help with grammar…tightening prose…critiquing the logic of an argument you’ve already made. But the hard part of forming the argument needs to be yours.’ blekhman.substack.com/p/you-need-t...

cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)

he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals

doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

A new mechanism for “RNA memory”! This time in Planaria! (Here's a video of a Planarian with mulitple heads, one of the heritable phenotypes we studied).

This work summarizes >10 years of research and is an amazing collaboration with the labs of Jochen Rink and Omri Wurtzel labs. Read thrad below👇

Final version @nature.com of our paper describing unconventional multicellular development in a choanoflagellate inhabiting an extreme environment. A ton of new data since the first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social preprint (which we've kept updating).

A brief 🧵 (carried over from the old place)

A war foretold: how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putin’s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them Drawing on more than 100 interviews with senior intelligence officials and other insiders in multiple countries, this exclusive account details how the US and Britain uncovered Vladimir Putin’s plans ...

Silence your phone, put the dogs out and the kids down for a nap. Then curl up and read this article/-it’s a long one, but very good.

www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...

Strikingly, we found that some well-known clinically investigated PROTACs are potent complex I inhibitors. In a case study, we demonstrate that the strategic introduction of “kinks” or steric “bumps” into a PROTAC scaffold can abolish complex I inhibition while preserving degrader potency. (2/4)

Can we make brains “smarter”? By boosting mitochondrial metabolism in neurons of memory circuits, we improved memory in flies and mice. Thrilled to see this work out - congrats to @amrapalianjali.bsky.social for spectacular work, and to all lab members for invaluable contributions!

Dynamic actin waves in a zebrafish embryo. Credit to @aaandmoore.bsky.social & Dvir Gur. #ZebrafishZunday 🧪

For anyone interested in the history of molecular biology, I cannot recommend Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation highly enough. One of the great book on the history of science.

I have two copies because a actually wore out the first one (paperback)

www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?...

Dr Kareem Carr man: i wish to publish @kareem_carr Jan 21 reviewer 2: your paper is no good man: i'll do anything to improve reviewer 2: it's simple. you must read the work of the great scientist Pagliarini man: *bursts into tears* but i am Pagliarini Andre Pagliarini @apagliar Jan 21 a first: in rejecting an article I submitted to a journal, reviewer 2 noted I failed to engage the work of one Andre Pagliarini Jan 21, 2026 • 3:47 PM UTC

I just thought everyone should see this

Cancer might evade immune defences by stealing mitochondria Hijacking the energy-producing organelles from immune cells seems to help tumours in mice to infiltrate lymph nodes.

New study suggests that metastatic cancer cells may evade the immune system by stealing mitochondria from immune cells and setting up a ‘shield’ that protects them from being killed by immune cells. Wiley little bastards.

#Science 🧪

Professor Fiesler's Brief Guide to Scholarly Citation Professor Fiesler’s Brief Guide to Scholarly Citation In any academic writing, it is important that you are properly citing your sources. This isn’t about formatting or making sure that you’re follow...

Sharing in case this is useful:
I teach courses where students have to write, but I am not teaching them to write. I have learned that especially for undergraduates (and sometimes grad students) I cannot assume that they understand how to cite, so I made this:
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Point of no returns: researchers are crossing a threshold in the fight for funding With so little money to go round, the costs of competing for grants can exceed what the grants are worth. When that happens, nobody wins.

Scarce research funding is becoming more economically costly than the actual investment, especially when it’s a drop in the bucket for profoundly stupid fad topics like “GenAI to solve Africa’s problems.” This piece is SO important: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I don't think you non-science people realize what it takes to get a grant funded by NIH. Started experiments in Sept 2021 to generate 3 new mouse mutants to model human disease. Prelim dara shows they have relevant disease phenotypes worthy of study. Need a small grant first to characterize /1

Old school cell division data hand drawn by Wacław Mayzel while he looked through his microscope; circa 1884. #CellBiology

A zebrafish embryo photographed through a microscope by Dr. James Hayes. 72 hours post fertilization. #CellBiology

From LSE… What makes students feel included in introductory STEM courses? An analysis of nearly 2,000 student responses shows that teaching practices, policies, and classroom interactions matter. www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/...

This story is absolutely wild. Did you know that avocados change sex over the course of a day? And that it's controlled by a single ancient balanced polymorphism? This is flat our crazy

Size of Life From an amoeba to a blue whale

and the winner of the "2025 best thing on Internet" has just arrived
neal.fun/size-of-life/

@carlbergstrom.com

This is actually the trippiest thing I've ever seen that was not deliberately created by M C Fucking Escher. It straight up took me over a minute to make sense of and now I can't go back.

This is the white-and-gold dress on a gram a week of trenbolone.

Allele Frequencies at Recessive Disease Genes are Mainly Determined by Pleiotropic Effects in Heterozygotes The classic theory of mutation-selection balance predicts the equilibrium frequency of genetic variation under negative selection. The model predicts a simple relationship between the total frequency ...

Well well. The standard model for how frequencies of recessive disease genes are established doesn't work. And that seems to be because recessive variants are visible to selection due to pleiotropy. (But still we teach Mendelian genetics...)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Come find out how to make your science more accessible. Hear and touch mitosis during my talk. @ascbiology.bsky.social #cellbio2025 #mitosis #midbody #tactilelearning

Polygenic embryo screening is being marketed commercially – but how do IVF clinicians view it?

• General approval is low (12%)

For specific uses:
• 59% approved of health-related embryo selection
• 6% approved of trait-based selection

🧵 Survey findings in NPJ Genomic Medicine

Lac operon: Wait… what?! Noise in the basement? by Christoph — If you've ever come across the topic of 'gene regulation in bacteria' in your biology classes at high school, college or university, you've inevitably learned about a classic: the lac operon of E. coli. Well, this it's not an exam here! Just ask yourself what you remember without the help of an AI.

Lac operon: Wait… what?! Noise in the basement?

by Christoph — If you've ever come across the topic of 'gene regulation in bacteria' in your biology classes at high school, college or university, you've inevitably learned about a classic: the lac operon of E. coli. Well, this it's not an exam…