Steve Eisman (played by S. Carell in the Big Short)

"DoD is attempting to pull funds from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), NIH’s leading institute for infectious-disease research. Trump officials at NIH disclosed the existence of DoD’s efforts only after being pressed for information by ... Democrats. "

Lucia Peixoto@sciencenlucia.bsky.social · 3w ago

WTAF democrats-appropriations.house.gov/news/press-r...

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨 Choanoflagellates reorganize their global cytoskeletal architecture within seconds to explore confined microspaces. This is the main PhD work of the amazing @maitefreired.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A tread 🧵⬇️

Rapid repurposing of microvillar content drives a flagellate-to-amoeboid switch in the closest relative of animals

Animal cells extensively remodel their cytoskeleton during differentiation and can notably switch between two major motility modes: flagellum-based swimming and actin-based crawling. We previously sho...

biorxiv.org

Wnt signaling decline drives age-related alveolar stem cell loss and impairs lung repair https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.18.745593v1

Excited that this is now out in MBoC @ascbiology.bsky.social Check out our new insights into the subset of cell junction proteins in action in migrating mesenchymal cells. Open access PMC version is in line being processed 🧪 www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/...

Mark Peifer (He, him)@peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The array of organs in the animal body differ dramatically in their architecture, but cell-cell adhesion mediated by cadherins is a common principle. Our lab usually focuses on epithelia but cadherins are also active in migrating mesenchymal cells like these migrating testis myoblasts 1/n 🧪

New paper in @natphys.nature.com! We uncovered a stress adapation mechanism where keratin intermediate filaments in stretched epithelia undergo a supracellular bundling transition that uncages the nucleus. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @ibecbarcelona.eu, @upc.edu @qmul.bsky.social

Holy COW. Text analysis of comments on the OMB rule: overwhelming opposition, overwhelmingly not form letters. (But 9 in 10 comments supporting the rule ARE form responses, LOL) Whatever happens next, folks have stepped up.

Karen R. Lips@karenrlips.bsky.social · 2mo ago

techpolicy.press/the-public-r...

A paper using RRID:AB_2736987 from @bioxcell.bsky.social was just published in Nature Immunology. Thanks for making your methods matter! #BetterScience #accelerateopenscience #ReproducibleResearch

Thymic alveolar type 2 epithelial mimetic cells revealed by RUNX1 deficiency - Nature Immunology

Waterfield and colleagues report the transcription factor RUNX1 expressed in mTECs profoundly influences the diversity of thymic mimetic cells that express tissue-specific antigens.

doi.org

Cellular biologist Marilyn Farquhar discovered critical structural components of cells, including tight junctions & desmosomes. A pioneer in electron microscopy, she served as the first female president of the American Society for Cell Biology, 1981-82. She was born #OTD in 1928. #WomenInSTEM

And thanks to all the great @biologists.bsky.social Directors, who give their time and expertise so generously to make The Company of Biologists the great #NotForProfit #Publisher that it is

Mark Peifer (He, him)@peiferlabunc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

At Heathrow hopefully heading home. Great @biologists.bsky.social Board meeting. Fun to be a small part of the team that makes @jcellsci.bsky.social , @jexpbiol.bsky.social , @dev-journal.bsky.social, @dmmjournal.bsky.social & @biologyopen.bsky.social happen. Choose society &non-profit journals!

In making its case, the text www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... plays loose with usual notions of: I) A paper (intro (summary of field), results, figures, methods, discussion) II) A cell III) Semipermeable membrane (has holes), growth (via fusion), division (via external force), cell cycle, heredity…

"A journal" was @biologyopen.bsky.social from the @biologists.bsky.social

Nature@nature.com · 3mo ago

A journal trialled paying their reviewers and found it led to faster first editorial decisions – and increased review quality go.nature.com/3RcRfpY

1. A bit of evolutionary biology. I'm really intrigued by a new perspective piece from Steve Frank that explores connections between how natural selection creates systems that generalize and recent work in machine learning about the surprising capabilities of massively overparameterized systems.

Generalization as the great leap in evolvability: insights from machine learning

Abstract. Natural selection encodes learned information in the genome. Learned solutions may be tuned specifically to past challenges, failing in altered e

academic.oup.com

💡 The laser was a solution that preceded every problem it would solve. Nobody in 1953 could list its applications, because those applications did not yet exist. That is what foundational research looks like before anyone knows what it is for.

The array of organs in the animal body differ dramatically in their architecture, but cell-cell adhesion mediated by cadherins is a common principle. Our lab usually focuses on epithelia but cadherins are also active in migrating mesenchymal cells like these migrating testis myoblasts 1/n 🧪

I did a bit of data analysis to inform considerations of this proposal. This is not completely simple since the number of grants a PI holds varies over time as grants start and end, and because this includes MPIs (multiple PIs) in addition to Contact PIs. 1/7

Jeremy Berg@jeremymberg.bsky.social · 4mo ago

New NIH Request for Information regarding capping the number of Research Project Grants allowed per investigator. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide... Open for comments until August 3rd, 2026

1/10 For decades, cellular aggregation was considered an evolutionary dead end. Cells could come together temporarily. But complex multicellular organisms like animals? Our study, led by JP Gerdt, with Ruibao & @jennahed.bsky.social suggests it may be time to rethink that🧵 #ProtistsOnSKy

To summarize: Most important Max Perutz was NOT an example of someone with a great idea who went against the establishment wisdom to solve an important problem that he had uniquely identified. He was part of an organized team working on this problem. He got lots of help. 11/14

I’m begging my fellow study section members to please “rescue” grants for discussion while this policy continues. We are going to lose lots of good grants to one unfairly negative reviewer otherwise. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Eating its own tail, the central dogma of molecular biology has come full circle! 🧬

Pujuan Poppy Deng@poppy-pujuan-deng.bsky.social · 5mo ago

I am so excited to share our new findings with you! We provide the structural evidence for a direct protein-to-DNA information pathway, showing how a bacterial enzyme 'reads' its own structure to 'write' DNA. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Our latest #abscission paper is online at MBoC www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/... . We looked at what happens when there are stochastic abscission failures in a polarized epithelium in vivo. 1/6

Cytokinetic abscission failures in a polarized epithelium affect apical membrane size and cilia | Molecular Biology of the Cell

Cytokinetic abscission genes are linked to cancers and developmental disorders, but the consequences of disrupted abscission in vivo remain under-explored. Previously we showed that in the forebrain o...

molbiolcell.org

Out now in @science.org Repurposing of a DNA segregation machinery into a cytoskeletal system controlling cell shape | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Repurposing of a DNA segregation machinery into a cytoskeletal system controlling cell shape

Bacteria, like eukaryotes, use conserved cytoskeletal systems for intracellular organization. The plasmid-encoded ParMRC system forms actin-like filaments that segregate low–copy number plasmids. In m...

science.org

I essentially took the entirety of the first 2.5 years of my PhD, 55 hours/week and set them on fire. Nothing productive or useful arose. Those years are also the years that made me a very good scientist. Grunt work and failure and friction IS the work. There is no way around learning.

Cameron Blevins@cblevins.bsky.social · 6mo ago

This is so, so well-articulated.

Chilling: What scientists told @jonathanwosen.bsky.social and @aniloza.bsky.social at @statnews.com www.statnews.com/2026/03/19/n...

Researchers surveyed by STAT detail the toll of grant cuts: labs shutting down, data unanalyzed

STAT interviews with 30 respondents brought the unmistakably human impacts of federal science policy into sharp focus. Here are three of those stories.

statnews.com

Apply now for the Signaling by Adhesion Receptors GRC June 7 - 12, 2026! The meeting has a terrific program that balances developmental biology, cell polarity, and adhesion and signaling. Please share! www.grc.org/signaling-by...

China increases science funding again (by at least 7-% over the next 5 years) as it pledges billion-dollar spending boost for science 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

China pledges billion-dollar spending boost for science

Funding for national laboratories and important research projects would increase under the government’s plans.

nature.com

🧵 1/5 A new BioRxiv preprint reveals that membrane tension acts as a mechanical gate for lung cell fate during development! 🫁 Our Flipper-TR probe was key to assess live Cell Membrane Tension (CMT) Here’s how Flipper-TR unlocked a hidden layer of lung development & fibrosis. 👇 #Mechanobiology

5/5 The Takeaway: Flipper-TR didn't just report CMT; it identified CMT as a master switch linking physics to genetics. From development to disease, this probe proved that how "tight" a cell is matters just as much as its DNA. Read the full study: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Yay! 🎉 Another new lab coming online in 2026! HIGHLY RECOMMEND training with @jfhorner.bsky.social as he advances #proteoform level understanding of #mechanosensitive #adhesion proteins. Be sure to follow him and his upcoming work!

Che-Fan Jeffrey Huang@jfhorner.bsky.social · 7mo ago

I am thrilled to share that I will be joining @tamuchemistry.bsky.social as a tenure-track Assistant Professor this summer. My research group will advance top-down mass spectrometry and proteomics to study the proteoform biology of cell–cell adhesion and phosphorylation in disease.

I conclude that NIH should make use of the large amounts of data that they have available to examine hypotheses before proposing developing new policies. 6/6

a cartoon character says just take a look will you while holding a tablet

ALT: a cartoon character says just take a look will you while holding a tablet

media.tenor.com