Just over two weeks left to register for MENI 2026! A !!free!! microbial evolution meeting in Ireland with some fantastic keynote speakers @jpjhall.bsky.social @rachelmwheatley.bsky.social @drrebeccajhall.bsky.social @tweethinking.bsky.social #Evolution #microbes
www.eventbrite.com/e/3rd-microb...
Dear colleagues,
The 36th French Drosophila Meeting (Trégastel, Oct 5–8, 2026) website is now online!
drosofrance26.sciencesconf.org
We look forward to welcoming you in Brittany!
Best wishes,
The Organizing Committee
Hadi Boukhatmi, Régis Giet, Roland Le Borgne
A plot from the post showing how the annual cost of grants at BBSRC has increased over time
A colleague said that the reason funding has got more competitive in the UK is due to increased grant costs, meaning less to go around. A quick crunch of the numbers to see if they have a point. 🧪
New Value: increasing cost of UKRI research grants
quantixed.org/2026/04/22/n...
Free speech news
of all the disqualifying traits, this is the most disqualifyingist.
2025, Trump to Zelenskyy: "You gotta be thankful. You don't have the cards."
2026, Trump to Zelenskyy: "Can we have some of your cards? (But don't expect any thanks)"
SARM1 inhibition protects neurons in FUS-ALS, Parkinson’s & excitotoxicity models. Will be exciting to see trials for these inhibitors in an expanding spectrum of neurodegeneration. Amazing therapeutic potential from inhibiting a protein originally found in a Drosophila mutant screen.
just saw someone call Kash Patel “J Edgar Boozer” and need to lie down
Cúigear fear. Cá bhfuil na mná?
FT Exclusive: The number of Americans seeking Irish citizenship through ancestry jumped 63% last year, as the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric and policies fuelled demand for ‘plan B’ passports. ft.trib.al/VLmOiJH
He must feel at home in a party of grifters
Dublin currently has ZERO cycle lanes under construction.
You'd think the climate crisis, collapsing AMOC, fossil fuel supply crisis, obesity epidemic, traffic jams or appalling road death increases didn't exist.
No urgency. Just subsidies for ... yep... more fossil fuels 😞
Elizabeth didn't like following the same laws that you and I have to abide by. #AbolishTheMonarchy #QueenElizabethII
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
The third round is now open!
I will be hosting a webinar with my colleagues on Monday 27 April at 1pm. To sign up please go to: shorturl.at/Vuwib
International applicants are eligible to apply!
Indeed. Great idea.
Check out our highlight of the most recent example of subcellular mitochondrial specialization in @currentbiology.bsky.social. Be sure to also check out the beautiful work from David Sherwood's lab
www.cell.com/current-biol...
From city halls to capitals, Europeans governments are now trying hard to unplug from U.S. tech — before a “kill switch” gets flipped.
It's not that simple. 👇
www.politico.eu/article/euro...
Imagine a destructive war had ended in 2015. And 4 of the countries that suffered brutal occupation, and 2 of the countries that inflicted it, today adopted a plan to integrate permanently to make war between them unthinkable. That's the timescale for foundation of the (now) EU.
Dozens of unexpected genes may play a key role in type 2 diabetes (T2D), according to new research from The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) published in @embojournal.org. 🧬 🧪
www.jax.org/news-and-insights/2026/a...
'...big German companies, such as Bosch and Siemens, also availed themselves of the Hungarian government’s largess. In a sense, Orbán took Germany hostage, which guaranteed then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s inaction. Orbán was just too important to the German economy to be allowed to fail.'
Washington can only pay attention to a scandal or two at a time, which means in the Trump age there are all sorts of should-be-big-deal scandals that don’t get the oxygen or media focus that they should.
I'll bet you've missed at least three of these: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/five-trump...
Lynn: “low IQ was likely a significant cause of the Irish economic backwardness”
Foreseen by the prescient Gary Larson in 1987
Really pleased to see this out @natsmb.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... MitoPerturb-Seq combines #singlecell #CRISPR screening with whole-cell Multiome, to identify nuclear modifiers of mtDNA dynamics. @mitocamb.bsky.social @mrc-mbu.bsky.social @prudentlab.bsky.social and Stephen Burr
Donald has claimed Iran has been defeated almost as many times as my trolls have claimed Ukraine has been.
I suspect we only get so invested in whether the Central Dogma is broken or not because Crick called it that. If it had been "the principle of protein synthesis" or the "rules of transcription & translation" or something, it would seem less of a big deal. Remember, it's not a "dogma" at all.
“We sent a cheque for over $5 billion dollars to the US Government and it doesn’t bother me a bit “…
Years ago @mikeduncan.bsky.social told me "you can rewrite shit but you can't rewrite nothing" and it's made every draft easier since.
