Science communication is going to a wedding and convincing a bunch of people you talk to that we need to be spending more on research funding.

Our review is out in JCS. One of the biggest reactions to my current work is surprise that eIF4E has nuclear functions, so I hope this will serve as a good source for people that are only used to it's role in translation.

Journal of Cell Science@jcellsci.bsky.social · 3mo ago

In their Review, Caleb Embree @cembree.bsky.social & Katherine Borden summarise the similarities & differences of mRNA cap-binding chaperone proteins NCBP1–NCBP2 & eIF4E, describing their roles in mRNA processing in the nucleus & in translation. journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/...

If you're at #RNA26 come see my talk on Saturday in the RNA processing concurrent session. I'm excited to talk about my work on cap-chaperone regulated splicing.

I'm so happy I managed to get into Montreal in time to watch the end of the Habs game. Though if they keep playing like this I didn't have to worry about missing the end, they'll still be going.

It's so fun to sit in a grant writing seminar and hearing that the deadline is coming ever closer and I'm probably not close enough to the nebulous publication threshold that allows someone to continue a career in academia.

It really sucks when the journal style require names for full in-text citations and include the in-text citations in the word count. I would be so far under the limit if the citations were just numbered instead.

I'm plagued by a blank western, which is even worse than a negative result. I just want to know if my knockdown is working or not so I can move on to other experiments.

I'm glad I got the draft of my review done yesterday so I can watch the bears game today without feeling guilty.

i love the idea of a guy who’s still been on the edge of getting into jeopardy after 61 years of it airing

I hate having to switch back and forth between writing and doing experiments throughout the day. It really messes with getting in the zone to write. I need to figure out a bunch of experiments that have days of downtime in-between steps so I can put all my effort into writing.

I don't know if it's really a resolution, but I hope to get at least one paper published this year, if not 2. They're in various stages of prep, so let's hope they can get over the finish line.

You can tell how mad a scientist is at a review based on how many times they start a sentence in the response with "indeed"

Running into the lab quickly on the weekend feels way different when it takes me longer to get into lab now than it does to harvest cells.

It was very cool to see Lynne Maquat talk about her labs work on FMRP today. It was the perfect intersection of my interest in NMD in grad school and my current postdoc work on cap binding proteins.

A day late but STILL IMPORTANT

The first paper from my postdoc is now out on BioRxiv! I was very lucky to join the Borden lab in time to work on bioinformatics for this project. We find that NCBP2 and eIF4E cause altered splicing when overexpressed, affecting largely distinct sets of transcripts. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Nuclear RNA cap-chaperones eIF4E and NCBP2 govern distinct fates for 1000s of mRNAs uncovering an unexpected regulatory point in gene expression

mRNA processing constitutes a series of steps in the nucleus to generate mature mRNAs that can be translated into protein. This relies on the methyl-7-guanosine (m7G) "cap" on the 5'end of mRNAs which...

biorxiv.org

It's so fun explaining the normal academic career path to non academics, because none of them understand why you do it. People look at me like I have two heads when I explain that as a postdoc I'm still considered a trainee most of the time.

The more I use rMATS the more I hate it. It's so annoying trying to get any information more granular than gene level or event level summaries.

I'm so glad the revisions on my grad school paper isn't extensive because I don't know how many weeks of 10 hours work days just to come home and work on revisions I can take.

I'm training someone that mainly does computational stuff in the wet lab and it's funny seeing his reaction when I get honest about procedures. Yes, letting a blot incubate in primary overnight can help the signal, but mainly I just don't want to stay late.

I was talking to my family about the devastation of academic science and it was so frustrating them not getting how bad it is. It feels like being a cow lead to slaughter, each day hearing the sound of the gun getting louder, and then being told they think it's just a thunderstorm.

While moving to my postdoc I lost a flash drive I had been using since high school. I paid the same price to replace it as it originally cost, and got 128GB instead of 8GB. The craziest part is that I wasn't that close to filling up the 8GB because everything moved to cloud storage.

Thank you protein tech, this validation data is very helpful.

Not telling the university until the media reports it is a great way to make this even more chaotic.

Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 2y ago

Next up, Cornell and Northwestern

The vibes around campus are about to get really weird. I've already had non-biology grad students I've talked to ask me how everyone is coping with the broader NIH cuts, so this certainly isn't going to help the sense of dread that I think a lot of people are feeling.

Matt Novak@paleofuture.bsky.social · 2y ago

Next up, Cornell and Northwestern

in case you're wondering, "what's the harm in claiming an extinct species has been brought back from the dead" when it most certainly has not, our interior secretary is already using it to justify taking animals off the endangered species list

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌@chanda.blacksky.app · 2y ago

Shout out to the home of my monthly column, @newscientist.com, which nailed their headline about the genetically modified GREY wolves www.newscientist.com/article/2475...

I don't know why I always leave writing methods until last. It's the hardest to do and way too energy draining.

Anyone could have predicted this. Columbia could fire or expel everyone who isn’t a white cis male and they’d still never get a penny of those grants back.

Tim Carvell@timcarvell.bsky.social · 2y ago

School Bully Shocks Nerds With Further Lunch-Money Demands

The only way you could think that assistants don't do anything at universities is to have never interacted with academia outside of going to class. They're the ones that make the entire thing run at an administrative level.

Josh Marshall@joshtpm.bsky.social · 2y ago

3/ Even worse than I thought. Here's the full criteria/algo.

Meanwhile… in Chicago ❄️ 🌧️ #StandUpForScience 🧪