A herculean effort by many, but esp. the first three authors: Ujjwal Rathore, Eli Dugan, and Hunter Thornton working in the Krogan and Marson labs, with a veritable army of collaborators from HARC (harc.ucsf.edu) and beyond.

Press release: gladstone.org/news/scienti... (inc. paper link)

now published at BMC Biology!
rdcu.be/fdITD

Reminder: PhD position in my lab is open for two more weeks.
How do germ cells use their own private transcription factors? Come help us find out.
Fully funded. Deadline May 1.
Flyer attached — please boost! 🙏

"Applicants who have received a C score at Step 1 in the other three main grant calls of 2024, 2025, or 2026, or a B score at Step 1 of those calls in 2025 or 2026 cannot apply to any 2027 ERC main grant calls" Does this mean if you get a C they went from 2 to 3 years ban?

Finally published at long last (at least in the pre-view version). Explore the wild and woolly world of archaeal histones! Interactive archaeal histone graph incluced rdcu.be/fdFjv. Congratulations to first author Shawn Laursen

New paper in Genes & Dev: we dissected how Sox2 — a key pluripotency TF — is regulated by a distal enhancer cluster (SCR) 100 kb away. The results challenge simple models of cohesin-mediated loop extrusion of gene regulation. genesdev.cshlp.org/content/earl... 🧵

Curiosity, cell clearance, and improv: A chat with Julia Batki In this interview, Julia Batki, FMI’s newest group leader, reflects on the early curiosity that drew her to science, why FMI is the right home for her lab, how studying cell clearance could help us un...

In this interview, @juliabatki.bsky.social, FMI’s newest group leader, reflects on the early curiosity that drew her to science, why FMI is the right home for her lab, how studying cell clearance could help us understand disease, and her love of improv.
www.fmi.ch/news-events/...

And the secret to getting a lot done without compromising quality is not caring about quality unless when and until it matters. 1/2

1/ BRAKER4 hatched!
The Earth BioGenome Project is on track to sequence ~1.5M eukaryotic species. Every one needs a structural annotation. No Perl monolith was going to survive that. So we rewrote BRAKER from the ground up. github.com/Gaius-August...

Love Drosophila genetics — this journal club was a great way to share that enthusiasm and pay tribute to the pioneers of transposons regulation 🪰 How classical genetics uncovered key determinants of TE silencing #transposon @igred.fr
@igred.fr
👇👇

PostDoc position available!
(links in post below)

Feel free to share!

Very happy to see this - congrats on this and again on the very interesting findings!

I wrote an essay. It’s about gain-of-function mutations. And penguins. Also ion channels, chihuahuas, the film Alien, recycled cardboard, and the Apollonian mind. Oh, and muffins.
Thanks to the editors of #GENETICS @genetics-gsa.bsky.social for letting me take some stylistic liberties. 1/2

A H3K27me3 reader complex couples H3K27me3 accumulation to nascent transcription of transposable elements in Paramecium - Genome Biology Background The ability to deposit histone H3K27-trimethyl (me3) marks is essential for transcriptional repression by Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2). This is largely attributed to Polycomb repres...

Our latest publication is now out at Genome Biology!
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

We uncover a unique association between a H3K27me3 reader complex and active transcription.
A thread with our key findings: (1/8)

#TEsky #Polycomb #transcription #smallRNAs

Postdoc positions in Nuclear RNA Biology - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics - RNA Biology and Innovation, Aarhus University

2nd call for postdoc positions in the lab. Get in touch for more information or simply apply here: mbg.au.dk/en/news-and-...

🍿

"Our results suggest that, at this stage, the main contribution of AI predictions is to provide quaternary structure models for experimentally identified PPIs." #alphafold

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New PI presenting to senior PIs at faculty mtg

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...

❗️5 days left to apply for a PhD position in our group👇

Undaria pinnatifida gametophyte

Our work on chromatin evolution in brown algae is now published in @natecoevo.nature.com! We show that developmentally complex brown algae evolved without epigenetic silencing pathways long thought universal, underscoring why non-model lineages are important to study. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How diverse is bacterial immunity ?

We report in @science.org how language models allowed us to predict 2.4M antiphage proteins spanning >23K novel potential systems.
👏 @emordret.bsky.social, @alexhv.bsky.social & al doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Explore them here defensefinder.mdmlab.fr/wiki/refseq_...

Conserved but mechanistically diverse piRNA defence against endogenous retroviruses in insects
#Drosophila

Germ cells have their own versions of core transcription factors and fertility depends on them.
We're hiring a PhD student to figure out how! 📢
Fly genetics + proteomics + genomics. Fully funded.
Aarhus University 🇩🇰
Deadline May 1 👇

Please share with anyone who might be interested!

PIWI proximity proteome reveals Set1-mediated piRNA biogenesis for transposon silencing in telomere www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03...

Yolanda and I enjoyed writing this review on X-chromosome reprogramming in the mammalian germline. 👇

Hope you'll enjoy reading it too!
@biochemsoc.bsky.social

#epigenetic #germline #XCI
@igmm-montpel.bsky.social
@biolum-montpellier.bsky.social
@umontpellier.bsky.social

Slavoj Žižek - joke about "I'm a nobody" [dutch subtitles] YouTube video by 5355365

All this sharing of the wisdom that one should not pursue publication in glam journals made me think of this joke
youtube.com/watch?v=L7PH...

FADD is recruited to activated STING oligomers to initiate caspase-mediated NF-κB activation in Drosophila melanogaster - The EMBO Journal STING is an evolutionarily conserved key regulator of innate immunity. In the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, STING activates the NF-κB-like transcription factor Relish, initially characterize...

FADD is recruited to activated STING oligomers to initiate caspase-mediated NF-κB activation in Drosophila melanogaster
Rune Hartmann, Jean-Luc Imler and coworkers
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Grateful to have worked with such an incredible team on this project. Excited to finally share this story about Top2 evolution and hybrid incompatibility in Drosophila. More to come!

A predicted structural interactome reveals binding interference from intrinsically disordered regions Author summary Understanding which proteins interact with each other and how they interact is essential for uncovering fundamental biology and for identifying new pathways involved in health and disea...

In our recent paper in PLoS Computational Biology, we used AlphaFold2 Multimer to predict the structural details of ~28,000 protein-protein interactions from high-confidence STRING pairs in Drosophila, and identified interesting patterns in disordered regions. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

🚨🚨 New preprint 🚨🚨
We found that the ovary directly controls protein appetite in Drosophila.
Yes — the ovary doesn’t just make eggs… it tells the fly what to eat!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
If you want all the details, click above ☝️
If you just want the fun, GIF-guided overview, keep reading 👇