From kitten to astronaut

Where U.S. science has been hit hardest after Trump’s first year The Trump administration has slashed the number of grants from the National Institutes of Health, with far fewer focused on women, cancer and mental health.

Those of us doing research related to women’s health have been hit particularly hard by the govt’s sabotage of the NIH. I spoke to WaPo for this piece, as painful as it was to discuss the reality my lab is facing. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2026...

The path is to have Congress limit MYF to historic levels, which almost happened until Vought threatened a veto. Speaking truth about why these arguments are lies is for arming Congress in the next budget fight. I have no hope that NIH brass will suddenly see the error of their ways.

They have to know that “infrastructure building” is what startup packages are for. So they’re just brazenly lying because there’s no actual justification for MYF.

A diagram showing that 24 annually funded grants becomes only 15 funded grants if 50% of the funds for competitive grants are used for multi-year funding.

I was preparing for a talk I gave last evening to a lay audience and came up with this graphic to explain multi-year funding and why it leads to fewer competitive awards and funding investigators and projects.

6/8

This is so infuriating. The #1 thing that would help ESIs would be to increase the number of awards. MYF dramatically cuts awards, and it cuts a year of funding. Plus, how is spending more upfront helpful? Hire 10 postdocs for just 1 year instead of 2 over 5? Horseshit indeed.

This is a reference to multi-year funding and this statement is complete horseshit.

Early stage investigators are not preferentially receiving multi-year funded grants and often need longer grants and more stability rather than the ability to spend more upfront.

5/8

I’m so sorry for your loss.

Modifications will remain until morale improves... er October. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

I'm excited to tell you about the most recent preprint in my lab, demonstrating that a conserved spindle matrix protein, NPP-21/TPR, is required for the stronger checkpoint in germline cells during embryogenesis in C. elegans

Did you get an honorable mention on the GRFP? WVU Biology has Fellowships for cellular stress response jengallagher.faculty.wvu.edu. To be eligible, students need to have received Honorable Mention on a NSF GRFP within the last 3 years. Apply jegallagher@mail.wvu.edu or etap.nsf.gov/award/8252/o...

Ancestral sequence reconstruction analysis indicates the S1/S2 insertion in the SARS-CoV-2 spike gene likely interrupted a codon Abstract. The genome of the seasonal acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus has a 12-nucleotide insertion that produced a furin cleava

New from my lab: Ancestral sequence reconstruction analysis indicates the furin-cleavage-site insertion in the SARS-CoV-2 spike gene likely interrupted a codon

academic.oup.com/ve/article/1...

New preprint with Bonny Brewer and Raghu's lab. Ku mutant genomes just go bonkers during chemostat evolution, but in very interesting ways! Telomeric amplicons of SUL1 and Y' in yeast are generated by microhomology-mediated break induced replication occurring in cis www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Weird. My PO said that even with a borderline fundable score IDeA-cofunding was very competitive. Very annoying if apps close to the (don't call it a) payline are getting skipped for NDs.

This is why I've argued that if we're going to do EPSCoR/IDeA, it should be normalized to per capita funding instead of total funding.

Congratulations Anne! 🎉🍾

One of my formative memories as a grad student is from when my now wife TA'd discussions for a team-taught genetics class with male and female Profs. The male Prof was great, but also weird, abrasive, Hemingway-esque. And the female Prof explained to my wife how they could never get away with that.

Reminder: one good thing about reviewing manuscripts on topics close to your own is that you get to see the complete insanity some other peers ✌️✌️ bring to the evaluation for free.

A star scientist showed that better genetics lessons could reduce racism. It was the death knell for his career Brian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught.

“We’ve lost out on the ability to continue to improve this work to make it more effective, and to explore how to apply it to other areas…There are a lot of different ways that genetics has been used to justify prejudice and…that human-made social categories interface with biological categories“🧪

For decades, molecular biology and human genetics have been built around measurements of average gene expression. That was partly conceptual, but also technological: for a long time, the mean was the quantity we could measure most reliably. Our new preprint argues that this framework is incomplete.

Check out our new preprint on IRES studies (www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...). We show a recently proposed IRES “toolbox” results in mRNA annotation errors and false-positive IRES activities. We provide an alternative set of robust approaches. (1/4)

This is a really important paper in an area that is hard to study. I would recommend any student read this preprint to see how confounding issues arise even in clever assays. Internal Ribosome Entry Sites (IRES) are very interesting because they bypass normal translation initiation mechanisms. 1/

Genotype-fitness mapping of adaptive mutants reveals shifting low-dimensional structure across divergent environments Predicting the effect of a genetic mutation on fitness is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. This study uses fitness effects of a large collection of adaptive yeast mutants in multiple lab env...

Really excited that this major work from my PhD is finally published in @plosbiology.org ! In it, we were trying to tackle a fundamental question in evolution - how do genetic mutations map onto evolutionary fitness? (1/n)
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Very excited about this paper. Olivia did such a beautiful job and in particular tackled an analytically very hard question of whether different environments are limited by the same of distinct functions. Very curious what people think! 1/2

After reading more carefully, they are automatically granting 4 weeks of late submission to reviewers. Less than before, but isn't nothing.

And a new journal at the time. That makes sense.

Now, without grammar errors.

The “avoid citing jerks” thread is kinda light on considering the impact on co-authors.

I've known a handful of people who are jerks to colleagues, but are genuinely good to their trainees. People are complicated.

I wonder about the weird spike at Cell Genomics.

HHS and OMB have stopped them.
They have mandated the new NOFOs also be written in “simple” text.
While NOFOs are being reduced, IC staff are working to get topics in place for parents.

NOFOs are being written but they’re being rejected or just sitting in HHS & now OMB offices….