RFK jr overrode the NIH recommendation for NIAID Director to appoint his own preferred candidate (who applied, but NIH declined to interview), per @politico.com. Institute directors have final say on funding decisions and are critical to the integrity of NIH. 🧵 www.politico.com/news/2026/08...

A lab-leak proponent is in line for Fauci’s old job

Steven Quay is in final vetting to run the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

politico.com

"San Francisco, CA"

In Preparation@inprep.bsky.social · 2d ago

With most 1st-year PhD students starting graduate programs this month, it seemed like a good time to address the most important dilemma faced by many incoming PhD students—how to choose rotation labs. Although perhaps obvious to those with experience, many of the key factors are often overlooked.

Choosing rotations and a dissertation lab - Help, I'm a Scientist!

By David Fay Choosing a lab in which to carry out your PhD is admittedly one of the more important decisions you’ll make in your early scientific career. But it’s important to have some perspective. F...

helpimascientist.com

Binning of scores is apparently coming mid FY27 (because THAT’S logical). But there hasn’t been official info sent to the program side. It seems there is definitely some push to dismantle peer review, which is not good at all.

Congrats to my departmental colleague Wallace Marshall on this well-deserved recognition. Nice to see quite a few former and current UCSFers on this list! I might even have been on the thesis committee of one of them. www.ascb.org/society-news...

ASCB Announces 2026 Honorific Award Winners - ASCB

Each year, the American Society for Cell Biology honors exceptional scientists whose research, mentorship, and leadership are shaping the future of cell biology. From groundbreaking discoveries to tir...

ascb.org

H3K9me2/3 strikes again! This time in B cells. The latest from the Basu lab at Columbia. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Co-option of retrotransposons promotes antibody diversification

A longstanding mystery in antibody diversification is how AID specifically targets immunoglobulin V genes. Ancient LINE-1 retrotransposons embedded within the immunoglobulin locus provide a recruitmen...

cell.com

Very interesting finding from the Ragunathan lab showing that a CHD remodeler in a NuRD-like complex called SHREC can trigger H3K9me2/3!

Kaushik Ragunathan@kaushikr.bsky.social · 2d ago

Our new study shows a CHD-family remodeler can nucleate and spread H3K9 methylation de novo, inverting the canonical hierarchy between writers and remodelers. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Latest from @arnaudkr.bsky.social on TF cooperation at enhancers, liked the combination of single-molecule footprinting at ectopic vs endogenous loci in mESCs. Curious if the cumulative activation frequency model holds for other less proliferative/plastic cell types? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cumulative transcription factor binding and p300-mediated histone acetylation drive enhancer activation frequency - Nature Genetics

This study uses single-molecule footprinting to quantify chromatin accessibility at enhancers and promoters in mouse embryonic stem cells and to dissect the contributions of transcription factor bindi...

nature.com

Sailing in @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social ready for summer, our study on the iconic Portuguese man o' war 🪼 is out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... We use (epi)genomics to understand a critter that fascinates me since childhood. Massive team effort with @obog.bsky.social, Cummins and Neely groups. 🧵

Awesome new tool from the Steinegger lab 🚨 A real time saver if you want to find phylogenetic variants of an RNA of interest! Check it out!

Martin Steinegger 🇺🇦@martinsteinegger.bsky.social · 4d ago

Riboseek is a fast RNA/DNA search. More sensitive than nhmmer at 250x speed. Structure-aware realignment produces MSAs approaching rMSA quality. Plus 1.7M precomputed RNA MSAs, and an API to search your own 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 💾 github.com/steineggerla... 🌐 search.foldseek.com/riboseek

This short-term funding bill blocks a corrupt policy that would allow Trump to hold even more federal grants hostage—and it closes House Republicans' loophole to pull funding for other agencies to give to Border Patrol. My full statement.⬇️

Senator Murray on Release of CR Text | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

appropriations.senate.gov

Superbug confirmed in 23 states: Where is the deadly fungus spreading in 2026? - The Hill

A genetic tour-de-force!

Tom Ellis@proftomellis.bsky.social · 6d ago

Our lab’s latest on synthetic genomics “Synthetic Combinatorial Minimisation of Cell Cycle Control” is up now on BioRxiv - covering ambitious yeast #synbio cell cycle work led by Anastasiya Malyshava and co-supervised by Matteo Barberis.

Top senators consider blocking the OMB rule. www.politico.com/live-updates...

Top senators consider blocking Trump’s grant shakeup in spending stopgap

It’s now “up to leadership” whether to head off the controversial changes, Sen. Susan Collins said.

politico.com

@microbetv.bsky.social takes a lot of selfies with trainees at virology meetings. In these dark times, I’m so lucky to still have his wisdom, advice, & support, though I haven’t been his trainee for 20 years.

Given the recent COVID-19 origins revival and Fauci witchhunt, just a reminder that I have written a book that answers to the best of our knowledge the question; and dismantles the many disinformation campaigns around the various lab leak narratives. Free access: open.substack.com/pub/protagon...

Lab Leak Fever

The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society

open.substack.com

Benoit Bruneau will receive the American Heart Association's highest scientific honor in November. @americanheart.bsky.social @benoitbruneau.bsky.social

American Heart Association Honors Benoit Bruneau with 2026 Distinguished Scientist Award

Bruneau, director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, will receive the association's highest scientific honor in November.

gladstone.org

deeply honoured and humbled. This really reflects the fantastic scientists that have come through the lab and made wonderful discoveries

Gladstone Institutes@gladstoneinst.bsky.social · 6d ago

Benoit Bruneau will receive the American Heart Association's highest scientific honor in November. @americanheart.bsky.social @benoitbruneau.bsky.social

One of the major pains of academia is having to click through labyrinths of webpages to submit papers. Now, thanks to Joe Rich (and AI), problem solved! His tool is called PaperPush and is available at github.com/pachterlab/p... It's super easy to use! 1/🧵

GitHub - pachterlab/paperpush

Contribute to pachterlab/paperpush development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Open position in our lab for a research engineer. The applicant must hold a PhD in life sciences and have demonstrable experience in molecular biology and biochemistry. For more info: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

Institut Jacques Monod@ijmonod.bsky.social · 6d ago

#JobOffer 💼 Research Engineer (M/F) 📆 October 15th 📍Institut Jacques Monod, @sandraduharcourt.bsky.social 🔗 emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

Next summer's Epigenetics GRC (I'm co-chairing with Deborah Bouch'is) is shaping up nicely with an all-star lineup of speakers working on a broad range of organisms and systems and everything from molecular mechanisms to new phenomena. Apply and put it on your calendar! www.grc.org/epigenetics-...

The academic culture of compensation drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/07/28/t...

The academic culture of compensation

I may have told this story on this blog before but it bears repeating as the setup. There is a distinct culture of academics that both derides and takes pride in what we see as our low salaries. Th…

drugmonkey.wordpress.com

RNA-seq tells us how much RNA is present in the cell. But to understand gene regulation, we need to easily measure the synthesis and decay rates driving this abundance. We introduce AIR-seq: analog intrinsic recoding sequencing. (1/6) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Analog intrinsic recoding measures RNA dynamics without chemical conversion

Steady-state RNA abundance measurements mask the synthesis and decay rates that shape gene expression. Analog intrinsic recoding sequencing (AIR-seq) repurposes the base-pairing properties of N4-hydro...

biorxiv.org

New Trump administration rules on federal science funding could make American research slower, costlier and harder to share theconversation.com/new-trump-ad... #Project2025 #OMB #NIH #NSF #science #Blues

New Trump administration rules on federal science funding could make American research slower, costlier and harder to share

Beyond deprioritizing scientific merit, the Trump administration’s proposal also restricts researchers’ ability to share their findings and collaborate with each other.

theconversation.com

There is a big misunderstanding about “the linear model” – the notion that there is a pipeline in science that goes from research to development – in the White House's report "Science A New Golden Age".

Had so much fun writing this commentary for #msphere! Grateful for the opportunity to write about work that’s shaped my perspective on innate immunity and RNA virus infection journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

mSphere of Influence: Damage in RNA virus infection—a feature or a bug? | mSphere

How does the body recognize viral infection? How do viruses engage the immune system during replication? These seemingly simple questions led me to study pattern recognition, a concept first proposed ...

journals.asm.org

A deep dive from @lisalsong.bsky.social on the harm of the proposed OMB fed financial assistance rule examining whether we could have achieved Nobel Prize level breakthroughs like the Higgs boson under such policies. www.propublica.org/article/fede...

How Trump’s “America First” Administration Could Shut U.S. Scientists Out of the Next Nobel-Worthy Discovery

A proposed White House rule would give political appointees unprecedented control over scientific funding. One physicist, who helped discover the Higgs boson, explains how the rule would’ve stifled th...

propublica.org

A simple but (I think) compelling re-analysis of a paper that Director Bhattacharya frequently cites in his talks to claim that NIH-funded researchers no longer pick up the newest ideas. Dr. Bishop concludes the opposite using the same data. The original conclusion was contrary to my experience.

Dorothy Bishop@deevybee.bsky.social · 2w ago

Further analysis of Packalen & Bhattacharya article, where they claimed #NIH-funded research was slow to pick up on new ideas. I argue that their approach is flawed, and I present an analysis that shows the exact opposite. pubpeer.com/publications...

Trump science adviser['s] proposal to reduce the role of universities would up end [the] system in place since WWII. His call for the administration to de-prioritize life sciences...raised alarms among biomedical researchers" www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/u...

Trump’s Plan for Science: More Money for A.I., Less for Universities

Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s science adviser, proposed overhauling how the government funds research. Democrats said Mr. Trump’s actions had weakened science.

nytimes.com